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HERITAGE Visitors to Monticello's Tufton Farm learn about plants from Thomas Jefferson's time TUFTON FARM ON THE NET

October 20, 2007 12:36 am

"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.

A cornucopia of horticultural offerings, the family-friendly event provided something for everyone: expert talks on old-style apples and cider-making, creating potpourri, saving seeds, benefiting from medicinal plants and controlling pests without chemicals; an Old-Timey Seed Swap; hands-on demonstrations; guided tours of the center's gardens, the Monticello vegetable garden and other sites; a silent auction by Master Gardener volunteers who staffed the festival; special activities for children; and tomato and watermelon tastings for everyone. And more.

A majority of the many workshops--held under tents on the grounds of Tufton Farm, which was one of Thomas Jefferson's outlying properties--focused on heirloom plants or seed saving, a nearly forgotten art.

"I'm in my 50s, and when I was a girl, all the older people I knew saved at least one seed each year--this flower or that okra, or Nanny's tomato, or Aunt Nelly's mushroom bean," said Wallace, a native of Florida.

"Nowadays, people just don't know that. But it's a simple thing, and very empowering, I think, for gardeners. They get excited about it."

Besides being fun and perpetuating favorite "pass-along plants," seed saving also preserves traits not to be found in hybridized plants mass-produced by the nation's big growers.

"A lot of heirloom vegetable-garden plants taste better. They have unique flavors that you just can't get from some of the modern hybrids," Cornett said. "So you're preserving that by continuing to grow it. If you're not saving seed, you can lose plants in a generation or a few years if it's not renewed by being grown and collected."

"It's a way to have these things remain in the public domain, and not have this important resource be so privatized," Wallace said. "Indeed, many will be lost if people don't take them up."

When interviewed earlier this week, for instance, Wallace was in the field collecting seed from an heirloom plant called Florida cranberry, said to give the color and tart citrus flavor to Red Zinger tea. It also has colorful leaves and stems that make it an attractive plant for the back of the flower border. Around the turn of the century, growers in Florida made bright-red jams and sauces from its calyxes, and shipped the seasonal treat north at Christmastime before the advent of refrigerated shipping.

The particular variety from which she was gathering seed, named 'Red Roselle,' is less sensitive to day length and bears fruit farther north than others. Provided by a seed-exchange member, it has done well in Southern Exposure's plots this year, Wallace said.

Discovering unusual varieties such as 'Red Roselle' is one of the joys of seed exchanges, workshop presenters at the festival agreed.

One national organization, Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, has hundreds of small growers all across the country who trade what they grow.

"You get a big fat book from all the people who have things to offer," Wallace said. "You can send for all this great stuff, basically for the cost of postage. The catalog is full of little gems."

Two groups--One Seed at a Time, a seed bank for Southeastern varieties that is based in Mineral, and the Appalachian Heirloom Seed Conservancy--give away samples of seeds to anyone who'd like to help save an old-fashioned variety, she noted. In return, each grower promises to give back half of his saved seeds to the seed bank.

Saving and sharing the seed of certain plants that you grow is also a way of making history--carrying on plants that have been passed down through your family, or crops passed among people living in your area.

"It fosters a real sense of community of like-minded people, of growing things organically, of good garden practices that are in harmony with nature and the land. It's going back to basics," Cornett said. "It connects you in a very clear, direct way to your food and the plants that you grow. They're not just something you buy at Lowe's and throw in the ground, and till under later."

The center grows and sells the seeds of many historic plants, available through monticello.org, and publishes a fine journal about historic plants, Twin Leaf (twinleaf.org).

Cornett and Wallace are about to begin planning a similar festival for next year, which may tie in with the center's biennial Historic Plants Symposium.

"We're feel committed to continuing with it," Cornett said of the festival. "We hope that it will just get better and better, and become an event that people put on their calendars as a yearly fall pilgrimage to Monticello."