Tho Jefferson's (1743-1824) Letters mentioning Gardening

 

Thomas Jefferson by Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817) 

1786 May 4.  (Jefferson to John Page).  "The gardening in that country [England] is the article in which it surpasses all the earth. I mean their pleasure gardening. This indeed went far beyond my ideas."

John Page (1743–1808) of Rosewell in Gloucester County was a noted amateur astronomer & served in the Virginia legislature & as governor of the state.

1890 Advice on teaching Boys to Garden

The Christian Recorder, August 21, 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Boys and Gardens

"By all means, let the boy have a garden, If it be only a bunch of sunflowers in a six-feet square city back yard, let him have something of his own to plant and watch the growing of.

"But if you live in the country, you can let him have a considerable plot of ground, where he can raise flowers, and also edible vegetables. Nothing will ever taste so good to him as his own lettuce and beets and radishes.

"Don’t imagine for a moment, however, that your boy, unless he be a genius, will know how to take care of these plants of his. No matter how much he loves them, he will require a good many weary hours of careful teaching and training before he is able to do efficiently even his small duty by his garden patch.

"The trouble is that boys love so many things. If they loved their garden only, or their lessons only, or ball-playing only, or stamp-collecting only; but it is with them as it is with the perplexed lover – “how happy could they be with either were t’other dear charmer away!” It is a good deal more trouble to see that the boy keeps his garden well than it would be to keep it yourself; but it is a good deal of trouble to bring up a boy right anyhow, and that is something that a mother might as well understand at the outset. Those who try to do it by easy means generally rue it with anguish of soul in the end.

“I never knew a boy who was fond of a garden,” said a wise man who had brought up many boys , “to go far astray. There seems to be something about working in the soil and loving its products that does the boys good morally as well as physically.”

And honest Jan Ridd says, “The more a man can fling his arms around Nature’s neck, the more he can lie upon her bosom like an infant, the more that man shall earn the trust of his fellow-men.” Again he says, “There is nothing better to take hot tempers out of us than to go gardening boldly in the spring of the year.” And every one who has tried this can testify that it is true.

"A certain little boy , who left a garden at home to take a trip with some friends, wrote home to his mother,” I am having a splendid time, but I wish every morning that I was sitting on my little green cricket in the backyard, watching my plants grow.” This little boy always thought that some time, if he watched closely enough, he should see a flower open, but beyond a few four o’clocks, he has never witnessed this ever-recurring but magically secret phenomenon.

"If possible, supply your own table with your boy’ s produce at ruling market rates, having it well understood beforehand how the money will be expended. Praise whenever you consistently can; offer prizes for the best fruits, flowers and vegetables, if you have several boys at work; and in every way treat the enterprise with consideration and respect. Many a boy who has put his best efforts into his garden loses heart when he hears it sneered at or made light of ” Your garden? Oh dear! I never thought of that! What does that amount to?”

"It cannot be too early impressed upon a boy that whatever he does should be done well. Therefore make his garden seem as important as you can without dwelling unduly upon it; and remember that the physical and moral effects of the garden are not all. The information that a boy gets from it concerning a variety of seed and soil may be invaluable to him later on.".

Interior of 1873 New York Seed & Plant Store

Inside the Store Wood engraving from Vick's Illustrated Floral Guide for 1873

History Blooms at Monticello - Dwarf Crested Iris

Dwarf Crested Iris (Iris cristata)

This charming woodland iris is native to the eastern North American deciduous forest where it often grows on rocky slopes. Peter Collinson, an English patron and regular correspondent of John Custis from Williamsburg and the Bartrams of Philadelphia, grew this plant from roots sent to him during the mid 18th century. 

In 1766 Jefferson began his Garden Book with observations of wildflowers along the Rivanna River, including the “Dwarf flag” flowering May 4th “in our woods.” Dwarf crested iris spreads slowly creating large mats of handsome light green foliage that deer do not find attractive. A white form, Iris cristata ‘Alba’, also occurs in the wild.

For more information & the possible availability for purchase

Contact The Tho Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or The Shop at Monticello 

Women & Gardens - 19C Gardening Manuals from Seed & Plant Dealers entice Women to Garden

When Gardens Replaced Children
Justor Daily By: Livia Gershon May 4, 2018

"Historian Robin Veder explains that the way we associate female nurturing with gardens goes back to the way ideas about gender & work changed in the mid-19C.

"Think about gardening, or tending houseplants, & you most likely think of a woman—perhaps a woman who has plenty of leisure time & loves taking care of living things. Historian Robin Veder explains that the way we associate female nurturing with raising flowers goes back the way ideas about gender & work changed in the mid-19C...

"Gardening manuals of the 19C described flowers taking “the place of children in bereaved homes” or in families where adult children had moved out.  Wealthy households depended on skilled horticultural workers—either hired or enslaved—to care for their flowering plants. But middle-class homeowners were limited to their own amateur efforts. So professional horticulturists, who stood to benefit from new customers at their nurseries & greenhouses, began writing manuals, magazines, & columns.

"Before 1840 or so, Veder writes, most authors of gardening manuals assumed their readers were male. But from the 1850s through 1870s, there was a flurry of books about flower gardening & indoor floral decorations. Women’s magazines including Ladies Home Journal actually grew out of horticultural & agricultural publications’ efforts to reach a female audience.

"Gardening manuals written in this period described flowers taking “the place of children in bereaved homes” or in families where adult children had moved out. 

"Prolific California gardener Mrs. Annie C. Brown explained in Ladies Home Journal in 1887 that her only daughter was now grown “so all my spare time is given to my flowers. They are to me as children…” 

"Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that a successful gardener treats her plants as children: “She loves them; she lives in them; she has in herself a plant-life & a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as if she herself were a plant...”

"In books & articles from this era, to buy a plant was to remove it from the cold world of market forces & transform it into an object of love...Veder writes that 19C gardening manuals drew on a long tradition of sentimental pastoralism—a tradition that “aestheticizes economically significant work by framing it as leisure.” Gardening, like parenting, clearly involves mental & physical labor, & both provide something of value to the household. But books & articles portrayed both activities as a natural extension of women’s being, rather than “work.”

To read about women's changing roles in the 2nd half of the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.