Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello, 3rd Ed

by Edwin Morris Betts

Book Overview

The restoration of the flower gardens at Monticello in 1941, sponsored by the Garden Club of Virginia, was the result of Edwin Betts's scholarly research and Hazlehurst Perkins's practical gardening skills. Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello presents the evolution of Jefferson's ornamental gardening efforts with an analysis of the flower gardens as they were planned, planted, and ultimately restored. No early American gardens were as well-documented...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813910870
• ISBN13: 9780813910871
• Release Date: August 1971
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Thomas Jefferson's Garden at Monticello

I found the book to be quite intersting and a valuable resource for the gardener. Thomas Jefferson is well known for his gardening efforts, both as ornamental and practical for food stuffs.The book has excellent photographs of the gardens of Monticello as well as Jefferson's drawings of how he wanted to landscape the area of his "Little Mountain." There is great pride in the book to document over one hundred species of plants cultivated by Jefferson while living at Monticello.Jefferson was a champion of cultivating indigenous plant life to Virginia and that of North America, but he had plants comming from thoughout the world also.Cultivating a mountain top graden presented problems for Jefferson in both climate and the proper hydration of the plants themselves. Without all of the modern conviences that we have today, Jefferson managed to have some of the most beautiful gardens in Virginia.This is a must book if you are looking for gardening proportion and scale. As Jefferson said, "There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me." Well said...In the book you will find very good descriptions of the plants grown at Monticello, this is a must volume for reference.

The Man behind the Garden...

This book includes color photographs of the current gardens at Monticello and black & white reproductions of Thomas Jefferson's own sketched plans for the gardens. There is an annotated list of the flowers and "woody ornamentals," such as roses and shrubs, grown by Jefferson. There are many excerpts from his writing and letters which give the reader a greater sense of Jefferson's broad intellect and love of nature as it relates to his gardens. I was hoping to find a list of flowers native to Virginia cultivated by Jefferson but, while the origins of many of the flowers are indicated, there is no separate list of the native plants as I had hoped.