My Inspiration

Okay, so that was a flop.  I guess gardening and great literature don't mix.  I've been racking my brain for literary works in which gardens and gardening figure prominently, but apart from the early chapters of Genesis, I got bupkis.  Please let me know if you can think of any.  But before I let go of the literary impulse, allow me to wax enthusiastic over a book I'm reading about Jefferson's Monticello gardens, A Rich Spot of Earth. 



Often I wonder at the things people read.  Gun magazines, Madeleine Albright's autobiography, Paolo Coelho.  Why?  Yet it occurs to me that others might wonder the same about me.  Perhaps not everyone would consider a book about Jefferson's gardens a must-read.  Here's why it is.

After writing the Declaration of Independence, serving as governor, secretary of state, and president, founding and designing the University of Virginia, and living in Paris as minister to France, all Jefferson really wanted to do was retire to Monticello and tend his gardens.  This gives one pause, does it not?  Is Voltaire right that our main concern in this life, no matter how brilliant we are, should be to "cultiver nos jardins"? I do think a case can be made that the careful, loving stewardship of this once-paradise is about the highest calling available to us. Plus, as a good Catholic, I like the penitential aspect to healing humanity's cardinal sin, the wanton destruction of God's creation.  Tikkun olam, as the Jewish mandate has it:  repair the world. 

Jefferson understood that there are few salves to the soul more healing than tending the earth.  Gardening summons in us the deepest of satisfactions.  The gardener is at once visionary, dreamer, pragmatist, artist, healer, steward, provider. Here's Jefferson on his calling as a gardener:

I have often though that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden.  No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.  Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another...But tho' an old man, I am but a young gardener.

Of course (and here comes the elephant in the room), the hard work was all done by slaves.  J's record on slavery is a terrible blight on his name.  A benign slaveholder, but a slaveholder nonetheless, and one who is particularly blameworthy, given the inexcusable gap between his mighty human rights rhetoric and his persistent refusal to manumit, even after death.   As one of the most enlightened and briliant Americans before or since, he certainly knew better.  And no use excusing his behavior as a product of his times.  Plenty others of his class, Washington, for instance, were much better on this score.

And yet.  Here's how I square his slaveholding with my tremendous admiration for the man.  Jefferson's greatness was so boundless, so capacious, that even when we subtract the slaveholding debit from his reputation, he remains one of our greatest Americans.  I do realize that this form of moral reckoning is risky, but that's where I am on this question.  Jefferson was one of those for whom Whitman's words truly do apply:  "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."  I use this line all the time on myself, but for me it always rings kind of phony.  Not for Jefferson.

What I really love about Monticello and the other Revolutionary-era estates of Virginia is the restraint these founding fathers showed in their design plans.  Just as their seminal writings eschewed the bombastic and the self-aggrandizing, their estates too demonstrate a certain modesty.  The Palladian impulse toward balance and harmony is very pleasingly blended with a healthy and humble appreciation for the vast, untamed wilderness they found themselves in.  They easily could have modeled their grounds on the prissy, hyper-symmetric Enlightenment gardens of Versailles and Schonbrunn.  Instead, they chose to embrace their English heritage, with its quaint love of the slightly unruly and the particular.  Spend some time in piedmont Virginia, as I did for two years when I taught in Charlottesville, and you will be struck by how perfectly the human imprint complements the land.  I have seen that nowhere else but in the mountains of Lebanon.