Set atop a soaring mountain peak in Charlottesville, Virginia, Monticello stands as a testament to Thomas Jefferson’s achievements, and its gardens vividly demonstrate the transition between the formal English baroque style and the elegant English garden style. Designed around 1807, the gardens underwent several changes but virtually disappeared by 1826. Thanks to the work of The Garden Club of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson’s extensive notes and correspondence about the gardens, they were recreated between 1939 and 1941. Today, visitors can stroll the winding walk, the oval flower beds, and the extensive vegetable, herb and fruit gardens and see them almost exactly as Thomas Jefferson envisioned them so long ago.
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Jefferson was a great architect as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence and a president of the United States. He designed many buildings, including his homes at Poplar Forest (near Lynchburg, Virginia) and Monticello, one of his most famous works. His last project was the University of Virginia, and its great dome and library are considered one of the finest buildings on a college campus in America. According to the tour guides at Monticello, Jefferson would stand on the walkway at Monticello with a telescope, peering down the mountain to observe construction of the University of Virginia. Standing in the same spot, one can imagine the great man contemplating the completion of his vision for a fine center of learning in his beloved home state of Virginia.
Among Jefferson’s papers, there are references to ideas for the flower gardens at Monticello earlier than 1807, but the first sketches for the flower gardens appeared in 1807 and this is typically the date ascribed to the gardens. On June 7, 1807, Jefferson sent his granddaughter Anne a plan for plantings on the West Lawn. This became the Winding Walk Flower Border.
During the Colonial Era, the prevailing gardening style in the New World favored the rigid, geometric style popular in Europe for many years. The typical Colonial Garden used extensive boxwood plantings to form ‘walls’ to create ‘garden rooms’. In each garden room, separate boxwood or lavender hedges created compartments for gardening; flowers, plants, trees were included, but kept to useful plants such as medicinal herbs, edible vegetables, and fruits that were both ornamental and edible.
Thomas Jefferson took a new and creative view when designing the Winding Walk at Monticello. Visitors were often surprised by the lack of boxwood hedges flanking the meandering path, but Jefferson stated in his writings that he wanted his landscape balanced with what he called, “the work house of nature…clouds, hail, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet.”
This newer style was more in keeping with an emerging style in England; the English garden style. During the 1700s, rigid formalism in garden design gave way to a more natural design style that incorporated lawns, water elements such as ponds, and natural-looking landscapes. Gone were the little garden rooms and geometric styles. In their place came meandering pathways leading to natural vistas replete with ornamental trees, shrubs, plants and flowers that blended softly into the landscape.
Visitors today are treated to the Winding Walk garden almost as it was during Jefferson’s time. Thanks to his extensive notes, bulbs, annual flowers, perennial flowers and specimen plants used throughout the garden are actual species Jefferson noted or close cousins. The following list provides a small sample of what blooms along the Winding Walk at Monticello. Many of the spring flowers are those that can take the cold, changeable spring conditions in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Spring flowers:
Late spring flowers:
Summer flowers:
The gardens at Monticello are mostly for spring and summer viewing. Most of the summer flowers do continue to bloom into the fall, but there are no flowers meant for special fall display.
The Garden Shop at Monticello offers more information on the many plants from Jefferson’s time, as well as sells antique roses, annual flowers, perennial flowers and others planted at Monticello.
Thomas Jefferson’s many achievements stand testament to his towering intellect and insatiable curiosity about the natural world. The gardens at Monticello harmoniously blend the landscape with the classical architecture of one of America’s most famous houses and provide a glimpse into life in the early 1800s.
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