This article appeared in the Fall 2009 Piedmont View (pdf, 7MB).

Peter Hatch and Ira Wallace are helping Virginians rediscover the delights of historic plants. PEC joined them at the Heritage Harvest Festival on Sept. 12, where we co-sponsored the Buy Fresh Buy Local tent. This year, for the first time, the annual festival was held at Montalto, the "high mountain" seen from Thomas Jefferson's "little mountain" Monticello. Last year, PEC purchased a conservation easement on 150 acres at Montalto, ensuring that this landmark will be protected forever.

Peter Hatch, Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello..

"I wonder if anyone had grown so many different things in one place before Thomas Jefferson did," says Peter Hatch, who is the Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello. By Hatch's count, Jefferson raised 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs and 170 varieties of fruit in his gardens and orchards-a multicultural, experimental assembly that Hatch explores in his forthcoming book, Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden. Hatch brings a unique perspective to his scholarship: for the last 32 years, he has worked the same earth as Jefferson, cultivating as many as possible of the same kinds of plants.

Finding those varieties takes detective work, he says. "We can find some of them, particularly with fruit. And with flowers we do pretty well. The vegetables-we might have 15% of the vegetables that Jefferson grew."

Jefferson had a passion for garden plants. A connoisseur of food and wine who claimed vegetables as his "principal diet," Jefferson experimented with such fabulous diversity in order to enjoy the best.

Hatch points out that Jefferson also saw plants as vehicles for social change. "He smuggled a rice variety to the United States, under penalty of death, from Italy," Hatch recounts. "His hope was to move low country Carolina rice growers away from their malaria-ridden swamps to the higher, healthier soils where they could grow this dry land Piedmont rice."

The rice-smuggling Jefferson was acting on a conviction he once stated: "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." Now, Monticello and its Center for Historic Plants are reintroducing some of these plants, with seeds on sale in their garden shop and online. Hatch says, "I think it's a tangible lesson in the past to be able to eat some of Thomas Jefferson's tennis ball lettuce or the Newtown Pippin apple or to be able to grow flower seeds that Jefferson grew in his gardens at Monticello."

This year, plants from Monticello are also growing at the White House, in Michelle Obama's new garden.In the spring, Hatch gave the Obama family's chef, Sam Cass, a tour and some plants. "We gave him artichokes and special cabbage and two varieties of lettuce and Jefferson's favorite fig," Hatch says. Now the plants are growing in a section of the White House garden dedicated to Thomas Jefferson.

But so far, there are no reports of the President stopping by D.C. farmers markets to consult with growers on promising varieties, as Jefferson did when he was in office! According to a letter excerpted in Hatch's forthcoming book:
"...Mr. Jefferson often visited and supplied the gardeners with the seed of fine and rare fruits and vegetables, which, by his desire, were transmitted to him by our consuls, who vied with each other in collecting the best to be found, in the different countries where they were located. These he not only distributed himself, but accompanied his gifts with the information necessary to their proper culture and management, and throughout the season would occasionally call and watch the progress of their growth."

Ira Wallace's grandmother saved seeds, at their home in Florida. Most people in that generation did, Wallace says, at least for some of the plants they grew. Diversity flourished, as individual gardeners across continents kept up lineages of plants that they selected for their beauty, flavor and adaptability to local conditions.

But in the last century, that tradition lapsed. "People got busy," Wallace says. As agriculture became more industrialized, fewer people grew food at all. Those who did were likely to purchase seeds or plants from companies offering only a few varieties. And those varieties were mostly hybrids-genetic mixes that "improved" the plant, at least for commercial purposes, but made seed-saving impossible, since the seeds of a hybrid don't "bear true"; the second generation is unlike the parent.

Wallace, in her own way, bore true. She rebelled against gardening only briefly, after leaving for college. She didn't like to weed, so she declared herself "over" gardening. "I was gone for six months," she says, "and I was like, I've got to have a garden. I feel so lonely and homesick!"

Since then, plants have been a consistent passion along a journey that involved giving tours at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, raising native herbs in Canada and introducing carrots to the vegetable garden at Twin Oaks Community, in Louisa County. Now, in her fourteenth year as a resident at Acorn Community Farm in Louisa, she co-manages the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, a company that sells over 600 varieties of heirloom plants-among them over 100 kinds of tomatoes, 42 kinds of peppers and 50 kinds of beans."

With a recent resurgence of interest in gardening, sales have been booming. Last January, they shot up by 70%. Part of Wallace's work is to let people know what they're missing-offering tomato tastings and other flavorful encounters at events like the Heritage Harvest Festival, which was held this year at Montalto where PEC helped to protect 150 acres facing Monticello.

Ira Wallace, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

Wallace says, "Heirloom plants represent a lot of genetic diversity... People don't know the value of all that diversity. It might not be so valuable to you right now, but it might be just the thing to deal with conditions that will prevail in the future.

"And they have flavor!" she says. "Most of the flavors we get in a regular supermarket-the plants weren't exactly developed for flavor first. They were developed for storage and shipping characteristics and enough flavor... One of the things that heirlooms do is they introduce you to this rich assortment of flavors and colors and textures."

"You know, when I first had Cherokee Purple, it had these kind of black-purple shoulders and it was not my idea of a good-looking tomato. But it was so rich in flavor and I thought, Oh my goodness, I like these black tomatoes! It's sort of exciting, when you get into it, to discover something different."

Seeds for PEC
This fall, you can get started growing heirloom plants and saving seeds-and help PEC grow too. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is offering a gift basket that will include a dozen packages of heirloom seeds that have history in Virginia and the helpful book Seed to Seed. 30% of the purchase price will benefit PEC. Find out more at www.southernexposure.com