Jefferson in France

From 1784 to 1789, Jefferson represented America as Minister to France, working as a liaison between the two nations. As well as attending to his governmental duties, Jefferson socialized with the intellectual elite of Paris, sharing their belief in human progress and admiration for the fine arts, including the fine art of gardening. The friendships he kept and the gardens he visited during his time abroad ultimately influenced his designs and plantings for his own gardens at Monticello.

In 1785, Jefferson moved into the Hôtel de Langeac, where he resided for the remainder of his stay in Paris. In describing his new home to his friend Abigail Adams, Jefferson happily wrote that the house “has a clever garden to it.” Showing an interest in the gardens, Jefferson made three drawings of his urban estate, one of which may be the original “clever” design, with formal gardens adjoining the house giving way to meandering paths laid out in the English style popular in France at the time. In a lighter pencil over top of this plan is an outline of the irregular space, the shape curiously similar to an elongated version of Monticello’s “winding walk.” In a second drawing, Jefferson simplified the design, reducing the series of informal paths to one extended outer ring.

The fashionable gardens at the Hôtel de Langeac included vegetable beds filled with both American and European species. He asked Col. Nicholas Lewis, of Albemarle County, for seeds including sweet potato, canteloupe, and “Homony corn,” a “small white rare ripe corn” grown at Monticello. Jefferson’s gardens in Paris also served as a nursery for the seeds and plants that he acquired from his new European friends, including European grapevines from the Rhine Valley sent to him by Baron Geismar after his visit to the region in 1788. Jefferson toured and studied the winemaking region of southern France in 1787, and successfully grew grapes while living in Paris.

In France, Jefferson often promoted North American plant species. On several occasions, he gave his French friends copies of his recently published Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he listed the desirable “medicinal, esculent, ornamental, and useful” plants of America. These wealthy, plant-obsessed Parisians were no doubt curious about the vegetables and trees found in the New World. The many letters from Jefferson to acquaintances in America asking for shipments of native plants and seeds such as pecan, Carya illinoensis, flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, dogwood, and willow oak, Quercus phellos, reveal the strong desire for American species in Europe.

Jefferson’s confidant Madame de Tessé was equally passionate about gardens, and on one occasion, she made a list of the American plants that she desired “in abundance.” A gift of plants that successfully reached Mme de Tessé in 1787 was a box of southern magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora, and Dionaea muscipula, the Venus’ flytrap, which Jefferson had procured from Dr. David Ramsay of South Carolina. Another close acquaintance, the Duchesse d’Enville, requested American seeds and plants including the Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha), white oak (Quercus alba), and tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), which she received from Jefferson in 1792 after his return to Monticello. Jefferson gave away many seeds of one popular tree, the Virginia red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), to both Simon-Charles Boutin and Lamoignon de Malesherbes. In exchange for the Juniperus seeds, Boutin promised Jefferson seeds of dry rice from China. Jefferson was in search of a type of rice that would improve the stagnant growing conditions in America that were “so fatal to human health and life.” To that end, Jefferson even went so far as to smuggle some grains of rice out of Italy in his own pockets. In several notable letters sent to correspondents in America, Jefferson explained the benefits of dry rice, olive trees, and the cork oak, shipping many specimens and seeds of each to America on multiple occasions. In another one of Jefferson’s many attempts to advance America’s agricultural standards, he sent sainfoin seeds to the South Carolina Society for Promoting Agriculture in 1786. Jefferson gathered the seeds from this soil-improving legume from his own garden at the Hôtel de Langeac.

Thomas Jefferson relationships made at the Jardin du Roi in Paris proved especially beneficial. The Jardin du Roi began as a teaching and medicinal garden in 1635, and later housed the country’s natural history collection under the illustrious directorship of the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). Jefferson was already aware of Buffon’s writings on the subject of America and although he greatly respected him as a naturalist, he disagreed with Buffon’s unfounded opinions regarding the inferiority of the native people, animals, and plants of the New World. In 1785, Jefferson sent Buffon a copy of his Notes on the State of Virginia in which he defended the people, customs, and resources of Virginia and beyond. Buffon immediately invited the Virginian to dine with him, leading to lengthy conversations and presentations of American animal specimens that eventually convinced Buffon of America’s equally impressive wildlife.

While visiting the Jardin du Roi, Jefferson developed a lasting friendship with André Thoüin (1746-1824). Thoüin, head gardener at the time, later became the garden’s director in its new incarnation as the French National Garden. Jefferson and Thoüin exchanged many seeds over the years, especially after Jefferson’s return to Virginia. In 1808, Jefferson’s “old friend” sent him 700 species of exotic seeds that he then shared with nurseryman Bernard McMahon of Philadelphia. In thanks, Thoüin later received seeds and plants collected on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Jefferson was also delighted to receive an assortment of rice species from Thoüin for his persistent effort to ameliorate the swampy conditions for America’s rice growers. After Thoüin’s death in 1824, his successor continued to send an annual shipment of seed from France to the Albemarle Agricultural Society. Jefferson intended this seed for the proposed botanical garden and school of botany that he hoped to have at the University of Virginia.

One month after he arrived in Paris, Jefferson toured the extensive public gardens at Versailles, and returned on multiple occasions. The Versailles gardens, designed by André Le Nôtre (1613-1700) one hundred years earlier, were the epitome of French formal gardens on a grand scale. He also enjoyed daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne and the gardens of the Tuileries. While Le Nôtre’s formal Tuileries (laid out in 1664) consisted of long allees and a large octagonal basin, some of the estates around the Bois de Boulogne, such as the Folie Sainte-James and Bagatelle, were examples of the popular English landscape style, which even France’s royalty embraced. The grounds of Petit Trianon, part of the Versailles estate, featured grottoes, a temple, and a winding stream, all features found in English estates such as Rousham and Stourhead. Within Jefferson’s own neighborhood were two more examples, one across the Champs-Elysees from the Hôtel de Langeac at the Marbeuf residence, designed by Jansen, an Englishman, and another at the home of Nicolas Beaujon, called the Hermitage.

Chaville, Madame de Tesse’s estate, grouped gardens of differing styles around the main central axis, including extensive Anglo-Chinese gardens with meandering paths and streams, fabriques, or small buildings, and kiosks. The country estate of Jefferson’s friend the Duchesse d’Enville, as well as “Tivoli,” the Paris home of Boutin, displayed the modern taste for the picturesque as espoused by the Englishman Thomas Whately in Observations on Modern Gardening (1770) and the Frenchman Jean-Marie Morel in La Theorie des Jardins (1776). On his tour of English gardens in April 1786, Jefferson used Whately’s book as his guide and made complimentary notes on the gardens Whately described.

Jefferson spent one particularly noteworthy day in 1786 touring gardens around Paris and the town of St. Germain with his close friend Maria Cosway (1760-1838), an Anglo-Italian painter and musician. The two companions visited many sights including Bagatelle, the King’s garden, and Le Désert de Retz. The grounds of Le Désert, the estate belonging to and in part designed by François Racine de Monville (1734-1797), were a classic example of the jardin anglais. Following the winding paths of the estate, Jefferson and Mrs. Cosway viewed a ruined column with interior rooms, a Chinese house, a Temple to the God Pan, and many other contemporary follies. Later referring to that momentous day, Jefferson exclaimed, “How beautiful was every object!” and “what a mass of happiness we traveled over!”

Jefferson’s friendships continued in the form of letters and seed and plant exchanges after his return to America in 1789. When he left the Hôtel de Langeac for Virginia, some of the plants that Jefferson brought with him were “two cork oak trees, a white fig, four specimens of Mimosa farnesiana [sweet acacia], and cuttings of the newly fashionable Lombardy poplars.” In addition to these European varieties, Jefferson supplemented his plant collections at Monticello with nearly annual shipments of seeds from Thoüin, and he kept up exchanges with the Duchesse d’Enville and Madame de Tessé as well. The great variety of flowers that he wished to grow at Monticello inspired his ideas for a “winding walk,” which faintly echoed the gently undulating outline of the gardens at the Hôtel de Langeac. His personal experience in design and horticulture at the Hôtel de Langeac, the copious correspondence expounding beneficial plants and encouraging seed exchange, and the enlightening tours of Old World gardens all contributed to the lasting influence that Europe had on Thomas Jefferson.

Lily Fox-Bruguiere
Gardens and Grounds Department
Spring 2008