Dear Mr. Jefferson: Letters from a Nantucket Gardener, by Laura Simon (New York: A Delta Trade Paperback, 1998; Out of print, but available)
Laura Simon offers a “one-sided correspondence” with “18th-century statesman and avid horticulturist Thomas Jefferson.” Over a 10-month period, from late-October to mid-August, Simon reaches across history, pulling gardening details from Jefferson’s writings, while also planning and growing her own Nantucket Island garden. Her letters touch on everything from seed catalogs to soil, to record-keeping, daffodils, tulips, asparagus, tomatoes, bees, and much more. Although primarily placed in Nantucket and Jefferson’s Monticello, Dear Mr. Jefferson reaches out to all gardeners, wherever their gardens grow.
It took ten months to arrive at this moment, this moment when it all came together, but those ten months stretch back untold centuries and reach into the unknown future. Not just the sum of its vegetables and flowers, this garden is a thread of life. It connects me to the colonial Australians, who liked their chard flamboyant, and to the ancestors of Don Fowler’s friend in Oregon, who probably didn’t eat their bush beans with olive oil and arugula. Best of all, it connects me to Monticello, through ‘Tennis Ball’ lettuce and the fabulous fairy clarion 'Mirabilis'. But in one of those turns that make life so provocative, it also connects me to gardens that have yet to be planted.
‘I am still devoted to the garden,’ you wrote in your sixty-eighth year. ‘But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.’ – from Dear Mr. Jefferson: Letters from a Nantucket Gardener, by Laura Simon