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Harvest Heritage Festival, at Monticello's Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, proves a hit with the public

Date published: 10/20/2007

"To the labor of the husbandman, a vast addition is made by the spontaneous energies of the earth on which it is employed: for one grain of wheat committed to the earth, she renders twenty, thirty, and even fifty fold, whereas to the labor of the manufacturer nothing is added."

--Thomas Jefferson, 1816

By CLINT SCHEMMER

SHADWELL--Ira Wallace wants more people to adopt a plant--to take one in, give it shelter and carefully rear its offspring.

Peggy Cornett strives to help people appreciate America's historic plants, especially those that are less-well-known or at risk of vanishing from our green world.

With complementary goals, Wallace and Cornett teamed up this fall to hold the first-ever Heritage Harvest Festival at Tufton Farm, home of Monticello's Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.

Wallace, who coordinates seed growing and variety selection at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange near Mineral, hoped 500 people might come. More than three times that many showed up, with some visitors traveling from as far away as Maine, Florida, Kentucky and the Carolinas.

"We felt it was a good way to connect with local people, not just the visitors who come to Monticello," Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants, said of the well-received event. "It also seemed to a fall in line with our overall mission of education and preservation, our efforts to depict sustainable agriculture and farming the way Jefferson did them in his day."

Thomas Jefferson's vision for America was that of an agrarian paradise, built upon the work of the small, self-sufficient farmer. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God," he wrote in his only book, "Notes on the State of Virginia," praising the virtues of the husbandman and "the cultivators."

Cultivation is a primary undertaking at the Center for Historic Plants, which grows the plants and seeds of Jefferson's time so they can enjoy a wider public.

"Seed saving has always been a big effort both here and, of course, at the gardens at Monticello. That's how a lot of plants are maintained," Cornett said. "There are a lot of plants we can't buy or find sources for commercially."

And providing a venue for the harvest festival, she said, dovetailed with the center's other aims: telling the history of horticulture and preserving the genetic diversity and heritage of specific plant varieties.

Tufton Farm lies two miles southeast of Monticello, within direct line of sight of President Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop home. It comprises 560 acres of what was once a 600-acre farm that Jefferson inherited from his father, Peter. In 1818, Thomas Jefferson leased it to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who sold it in 1828 for Jefferson's estate after his grandfather died. (Thomas Jefferson died in 1826.) In Jefferson's time, the farm probably raised cereal crops such as wheat, rye and corn, and also had livestock, overseers' houses and slave dwellings, Monticello spokesman Wayne Mogielnicki said. Today, the oldest remaining building on the property is a small stone cottage, built in 1819 as an addition to a wooden overseer's home that did not survive. The most prominent structure, a brick farmhouse, dates to the early 1830s. The Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants is headquartered in a nearby barn. Tufton Farm is open to the public for an open house each spring, during some of Monticello's popular Saturdays in the Gardens programs, and by appointment. For more information about arranging a group visit, call Monticello at 434/984-9822. Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants: monticello.org/chp Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: southernexposure.com One Seed at a Time, an organic seed bank trying to save the biodiversity of heirloom Southeastern vegetables and flowers: savingourseed.org Appalachian Heirloom Seed Conservancy: Ken tuckySeeds@hotmail.com Seed Savers Exchange, a pioneer in the heirloom seed movement: seedsavers.org Vintage Virginia Apples, working to preserve the Blue Ridge Mountains' orchard heritage: vintagevirginiaapples.com Garden Medicinals and Culinaries, a family-owned specialty mail-order firm in Earlysville: gardenmedicinals.com United Plant Savers, focusing on native medicinal species: unitedplantsavers.org

Date published: 10/20/2007