Monticello gardens
— the kitchen garden a president kept notes on.
Not only on a wall.
Monticello gardens, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The thousand-foot terrace Jefferson cut into the southeast face of his mountain in 1806. Seventy kinds of pea, fifteen kinds of bean, sea kale and salsify, a Marseilles fig trained against the south wall. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation grows it again from his Garden Book, planted close to the same week he planted it. Best walked in late April, when the early lettuces come in. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The vegetable terrace at Monticello runs 1,000 feet along the south-facing slope of Jefferson's mountain, about 850 feet above Charlottesville. Jefferson kept a Garden Book from 1766 to 1824 recording 330 varieties of 99 species. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which has owned the estate since 1923, restored the terrace in the 1980s under garden director Peter Hatch, working from the Garden Book and the 1809 plat. An orchard of nearly 170 fruit varieties sits below the terrace, with the West Lawn flower beds along the house above.
The garden runs March through November, with peaks in late spring and again in September. Jefferson raced his Charlottesville neighbors for the earliest dish of English peas; his Garden Book records first sowings as early as February 20 and as late as April 5. Sea kale comes up under clay pots in March, lettuces in April, the Marseilles fig fruits in August. The Heritage Harvest Festival each September brings seed savers to the south pavilion to swap heirloom varieties grown from the Center for Historic Plants stock.
Monticello sits three miles southeast of Charlottesville off Virginia Route 53 and is open daily except Christmas. A grounds pass is the cheapest ticket and covers the vegetable terrace, the West Lawn flower beds, and the South Orchard without the house tour. The Saunders-Monticello Trail climbs two miles from the visitor center through woods to the mountaintop, and a shuttle runs about every fifteen minutes. The Center for Historic Plants nursery at Tufton Farm, a mile downhill, sells the same Jefferson-era seeds used in the restoration.
