Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about
the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson
Volume XXII, Number 4 April 2025
THE GARDENS: Apropos of Historic Garden Week
in Virginia from April 26-May 3 this year—and the fact that the annual
statewide event began in 1927 when the Garden Club of Virginia held a flower show
to raise funds to preserve trees on Monticello’s lawn planted by Thomas
Jefferson—I thought about what I wrote about the mountaintop’s extensive flower
gardens in Saving Monticello.
Mea culpa: I did
not go into depth on the subject in the book. However, I did note that James
Turner Barclay, who purchased the property in 1831 from the Randolph family
five years after Jefferson’s death, at the very least did not properly care for
the Sage of Monticello’s Jefferson’s carefully planned and cultivated flower
gardens—primarily the twenty oval-shaped beds planted with different flowers around
the house and encircling the West Lawn.
I extensively covered Jefferson Levy’s work repairing and restoring Monticello itself after taking ownership in 1879 at a time when the house was in terrible condition after nearly twenty years of neglect. And I wrote that he, didn’t get around to working on refurbishing the gardens until near the turn of the 20th century.
Jefferson’s “orchards and terraced gardens, the serpentine
flower-borders on the western lawn, and the beautiful ‘walkabout’ walks and
drives have all disappeared,” a visitor to Monticello wrote in 1887. Not long
after that, Levy vowed to restore Monticello’s grounds “as nearly as possible
to its condition in Jefferson's time.”
Less than ten years later, in April 1898, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported favorably on recent work Levy had done on the grounds. “The banks on either side of the drive from the porter’s lodge to the mansion have been sewn with grass seed, and at intervals rare and beautiful flowers have been planted, which are now blooming,” an April 28 article said. “The lawns are in perfect sod and on them are late acquisitions of flowering shrubs.”
****************
I recently discovered
a few more details about how Jefferson Levy continued lavishing attention on
the grounds until he sold the property in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Foundation. The info came from a short chapter in Historic Gardens of
Virginia, a book published in 1921 by the James River Garden Club, which had
been founded in 1915 in Richmond.
The book’s three-page report on Monticello, written by the
club’s founder, Juanita Massie Patterson, offers a look at the gardens and
grounds at the time, and credits Jefferson Levy for not making any changes to
“the house and gardens,” and for “restoring Monticello to its original beauty.”
Patterson starts with describing what she saw as she entered the property through a gate at the “outer entrance” at the gatekeeper’s lodge that Levy had recently built.
“The drive to the house” from there to the house, she wrote,
goes through “the woods…, enchanting in early spring. [T]he luxuriant growth of
Scotch broom, with its pendant yellow blossoms, carpets the ground beneath,
forming a veritable cloth of gold.”
The drive took her past the Jefferson family graveyard, then
through a gate that opened onto the West Front’s lawn. The garden there, she
wrote, “is arranged in a chain of rectangular plots, with grass walks between.”
Just before getting to the house, she wrote, “may still be
seen the old-time shrubs on either side of the path leading to the house. A
large club of lilacs and syringa with modern privet hides the exit of the
underground passage to the house.”
By the way, in homage to Thomas Jefferson’s “revolutionary” gardening, the Shops at Monticello offers a large selection of heirloom seeds and plants for sale at the mountaintop’s Center. Many also can be ordered on line throughout the years at https://bit.ly/MontGardens To scroll through Monticello’s All Plants Archive, go to https://bit.ly/PlantArchive
EVENTS AND COMMERCE: I have a growing
number of events scheduled this spring and summer, most of them for my new
book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the
extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest
ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war.
Many are speaking engagements for historic
preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events
If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com The book is now in its fourth printing, with a fifth on the way.
