University Daily Kansan / Wednesday, May 2, 1990
A.
Jefferson gave broccoli presidential acceptance
The Associated Press
POUND RIDGE, N.Y. — Friends of broccoli, saddened by George Bush's distaste for it, can get a lift from another president. Thomas Jefferson, master gardener as well as author of the Declaration of Independence, grew numerous varieties.
Broccoli - green, purple, white — are mentioned repeatedly in garden notes Jefferson kept throughout his life. He planted the vegetable in his own kitchen garden at Monticello in Omaha and exchanged seeds with friends.
Anyone looking for a patron saint of gardening will find the perfect model in Jefferson.
"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden." he once said.
Jefferson, who was a statesman, inventor, architect, astronomer and founder of the University of Virginia, lived to age 83. But despite his myriad activities, he had time for a new book. It was published dated March 30, 1768, when he was 22: "Purple hyacinth begins to bloom."
The burdens of the presidency did not stop him. On April 6, 1804, for example, he wrote, "Sowed seeds of the East India asparagus in small bed." Sometimes he jotted garden notes on odd sheets of paper.
in 1808, his last year in the White House, Jefferson wrote to a friend, "It is now among my most fervent longings to be on my farm, which with a garden and fruiter, will provide the principal occupation in retirement."
The nation's third president left a wealth of material about his gardening and farming, highlights of which are in the 704-page "Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book." First published in 1944 by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the book was reprinted in 1885.
The gardens at Monticello in Charloteville, Va., were restored more than 50 years ago by the Garden Club of Virginia. Vegetable growers will be fascinated by the kitchen garden stretching 1,000 feet along the sunny southern slope and containing more than 250 varieties, including English peas, Jefferson's favorite.
Through correspondence and accounts of others, the Garden Book, annotated by Edwin Morris Bettis, a biology professor at the University of Virginia, gives rare glimpses of Jefferson. One chronicler, Margaret Bayard Smith, reports that he kept a pet mocking bird in a caged suspended among his flowers and plants in the White House.
white house.
"Whenever he was alone, he opened the cage and let the bird fly about the room," Smith wrote. "It would alight on his table and regale him with its sweetest notes or perch on his shoulder and take its food from his lips."
168. The correspondence reveals Jefferson on expeditions in southern France and Italy while he was minister to France, always looking for varieties of crops such as rice that might do well in the United States.
He wrote, for example, "The olive tree is least known in America, and yet the most worthy of being known. Of all the gifts of heaven to man, it is next to the most precious . . . Perhaps it may claim a preference even to bread, because there is such an infinitude of vegetables which it renders a proper and comfortable nourishment."
Intimate views of Jefferson as gardener and farmer in his old age also are contained in "Jefferson and His Time, the Sage of Monticello," the sixth and final volume of Dumas Malone's epic biography. His previous volumes won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1975.
The books say Jefferson collected seeds everywhere — county neighbors, nurserymen, naturalists, from a friend in Italy, even from Gen. Lafayette's aunt.
Smith, who was the wife of the publisher of the National Intelligence, visited him in his retirement and reported that he kept his vegetable seeds in a little close. Peas and beans and both the other seeds were in little containers, labeled and hung in order on little books.
in order of death.
As the years went on, Jefferson suffered from rheumatism, but his spirit was not dampened.
spirit was not dampener.
"Though an old man," he said, "I am but a young gardener."
The rate of extinction of species from this earth was 1 every 4 years from 1600 to 1900. It's now estimated to be 1000 per year.
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