Qualla: Gardens of Monticello

Gardens of Monticello: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 4.0. Thomas Jefferson kept a book called the Garden Kalender, and in it he recorded triumphs and failures with the same patient hand he used to draft the Declaration of Independence. The empress tree from China. The pattypan squash. The vines coaxed up from the Mediterranean. Monticello's gardens were less a flourish of beauty than an open-air laboratory, and from 1808 to 1812 - during the final year of his presidency and the first years of his retirement - Jefferson directed an experiment in horticulture that ran across a thousand-foot terrace cut from the side of a Virginia mountain.

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gardens of Monticello: A President's Mountain Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. The site itself was an act of engineering. In 1806 enslaved laborers began carving a flat plateau into the hillside, hauling stone for a retaining wall that still holds the garden against gravity two centuries later. Above the terrace sit oval and circular flower beds tucked at t...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5

Gardens of Monticello: The Garden Book

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frypie, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jefferson began keeping garden notes in 1766, when he was twenty-three. He never really stopped. From 1766 to 1824 he documented the dates flowers opened, the weather that killed seedlings, the yields of squash and the fates of imported figs. He wrote his overseer Edmund Bacon lo...

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Image: Frypie | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gardens of Monticello: Who Worked the Ground

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. The story Jefferson's garden book tells is only one of several being told at Monticello at the same time. The plantation ran on the labor of enslaved people, and the gardens were no exception. The winding flower border laid out in 1808 was tended by Jefferson's daughters and by e...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5

Gardens of Monticello: Ruin and Restoration

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, his estate was deep in debt. Parts of the property were sold and replanted with paper mulberries to feed silkworms, briefly promising profits that never came. The terrace went wild. The oval beds disappeared under grass. The vineyard died back...

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Gardens of Monticello: What You Can See From Above

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. From the air the layout still reads like a diagram. The thousand-foot terrace runs along the south side of the mountain like a long green sentence. The orchards step down the slope to the west. The house sits at the crown, its dome a small white period at the end of the ridge. Ch...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Moofpocket assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5