Read by Matilda Longbottom

A few weeks ago, in a burst of ambition and historical culture, Randy and I took the kids on a week-long vacation to Washing­ton, D.C. We had a high old time there: Caleb fell off the escala­tor in the Air and Space Museum; we spilled three glasses of root beer in the National Museum of History and Technology; and Caleb—there’s a pattern here—got reprimanded for run­ning in the halls at the National Gallery of Art.

I had my back­pack searched twice, for possible possession of bombs, but came up clean; all available parking spaces were permanently occu­pied by Republicans, and the boys thought the Hope Diamond was dinky.

All this took four days, at which point—having, we felt, temporarily exhausted our Nation’s Capitol—we drove south to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

I’ve always liked Thomas Jefferson.

He wrote that nice phrase about being an old man but a young gardener.

And he kept pea seeds in a box in his closet.

There’s a Visitor’s Center now in Charlottesville, Virginia, designed to brief tourists for their actual ascent of Jefferson’s little mountain.

It has an attached museum, endearingly stuffed with Jeffersonian mementoes, and there, in a little glass case, just down from Jefferson’s moldboard plow, is one of Jeffer­son’s gardening books.

It was written by an Englishman named William Shenstone, and published in 1764. Jefferson, irrepress­ible bookhound that he was, owned a lot of gardening books, but this one had the best title. It was called Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening.

William Shenstone, the gentleman whose unconnected thoughts so appealed to Thomas Jefferson, was a poet, noted—more or less—for a work titled “The Schoolmistress, a Poem in Imitation of Spenser,” which hit the stands in 1742.

Soon after­wards, Shenstone came into his inheritance—an estate in Shrop­shire named Leasowes- and retired to the country to garden. And garden he did.

Shenstone, to the awed admiration of all about him, turned his property into a vast landscape park—a series of carefully planned ornamental garden pictures, mood­ily dotted with urns, busts, broken columns, and occasional benches for the emotionally affected to sink down upon in the process, he coined the term “landscape gardening,” invented the winding garden path—the pre-Shenstone garden was a thing of geometrical straightaways—and went broke.

Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts describes—in quite or­derly fashion—his philosophy of gardening. Gardening, said Shenstone, is akin to picture-painting. The well-done garden should present to the viewer a series of romantic scenes, each conducive to contemplation and romantic reverie. Along these lines, said Shenstone, there are only three kinds of garden scenes: the sublime, the beautiful, and the pensive or melancholy.

This man is a goop, I thought.

Our garden, of course, is none of the above. It certainly isn’t sublime; and even beautiful is pushing it: The compost heap, for example, isn’t at all attractive, there’s that pile of rubble next to the barn where a previous owner knocked down the silo, and something large and hungry keeps eating the rosebushes.

But it’s not melancholy, either. Not with all those marigolds, it isn’t. “Devil-may-care” might be a good word for it. Or cocky. Inde­pendent. “I’m growing,” you can imagine it saying, “so DON’T TREAD ON ME.” It would thumb its nose at the lord of the manor and wear its blue jeans to visit the queen.

I do, of course, think Unconnected Thoughts in it, but most are starkly unpoetic. “Where’s the trowel?” I mutter to myself. “Why, with ten acres of weeds to excavate, does the dog have to dig up the asparagus bed? Is it possible to fix a hose nozzle that has been run over by a tractor? WHERE’S THE TROWEL?”

Sometimes, though, in peaceful moments, I contemplate the gardening mind of Thomas Jefferson. A man who kept peas in his closet, it seems to me, had no business admiring William Shenstone and his urns.

And a garden has no business pretend­ing to be a picture. That’s the real stuff going on out there: That’s dirt, worms, photosynthesis, vitamins, and zucchini.

I suspect Jefferson thought so, too. He had a lot of plans for the landscaping of Monticello. His gardens were eventually to include—in best Shenstonian style—a number of picturesque structures, among them a Tuscan temple, a Greek lantern on a pedestal, and a couple of Chinese pavilions.

But he never got around to building them. Instead, he bought Merion sheep, planted strawberries and potatoes, traded squash seeds with a friend in Baltimore, and noted the appearance, every spring, of the first fireflies. ❖