Notes on the State of Virginia

“Monticello is a garden that celebrates the American landscape, which becomes incredibly important after the War of Independence when the Americans, who don’t have the poetry and castles of the Old World, are desperately trying to be able to demonstrate that things are better in the New World. And landscape becomes a way of doing that, because the towering trees and vastness of the continent are genuinely more spectacular. So what Jefferson does is put his garden on a mountain top which overlooks 60 miles of Virginia but he doesn’t just create a sublime garden but also incorporates, right at the garden’s centre, a vegetable garden that’s 1,000 feet long and has the best view in the whole garden. So he combines the beauty and the utilitarian, which I think really marks the difference between the English and American garden.” Read more...

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Andrea Wulf, Historian