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Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden

Grand Homes & Gardens 2026

Thursday, March 26 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The third program in the 2026 Grand Homes and Gardens series, Freedom at Home: Telling the Full Story of America’s Founding Homes & Gardens, featuring gardens of Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia with speaker Peter Hatch, Gardener, Historian, and Emeritus Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture," and the Monticello vegetable garden, a 1,000-foot-long terrace, became an experimental laboratory, an Ellis Island of new and unusual edible plants from around the world. Jefferson was a strong believer in a vegetable diet, and this revolutionary garden inspired a revolutionary cuisine in the kitchen at Monticello. The Jefferson legacy in food, wine, and gardening is profound -- setting a strong foundation and high standard for the farm to table movement today.

Mostly restored today to the early nineteenth century, Monticello’s gardens feature extensive flower beds, a terraced vegetable garden, and orchards of fruit trees. Much of the work constructing, cultivating, and maintaining the gardens would have fallen to enslaved labor. Thomas Jefferson enslaved over six hundred people throughout his life.

About the Speaker

Peter J. Hatch is a gardener and historian living in Albemarle County, Virginia, where he gardens, lectures, consults, and writes about garden history. The Emeritus Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Hatch was responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello from 1977 to 2012.



Peter Hatch also conceived and oversaw numerous educational programs, including Monticello Garden Tours (for 35,000 annual visitors); the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a unique nursery selling and preserving garden varieties and species from our past; the Saturdays in the Garden program of natural history walks, lectures, and horticultural workshops; and the Historic Landscape Institute, a two week field school for students from around the nation. 

Hatch is the author of four books on Thomas Jefferson, and he has lectured in thirty-eight states on Monticello and the history of garden plants. Hatch’s book on the Monticello vegetable garden of Jefferson’s retirement years, ‘A Rich Spot of Earth’: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (Yale University Press), received the American Horticultural Society's Best Book Award for 2012.

In 2011, he received The Garden Club of America’s Medal in Historic Preservation, the first horticulturist to receive the award, and in 2012, Peter Hatch was awarded the Flora Ann Bynum medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Southern Garden History Society.

For Morven Members

Please note that you must login into your Morven Member account in the upper righthand corner of the registration page in order to access the member rate.

Series Schedule

All programs begin at 6:30 p.m. Doors will open at 6:00 p.m. for light refreshments. The programs are hybrid, offered both in-person and virtually. Upon registration, a Zoom link will be sent to virtual participants. All programs will be recorded and shared with registrants following each event.

In an 1804 newspaper advertisement, Trenton clock and watchmaker William J. Leslie touted that he was “Not from Paris, London or Boston – But a Native of New-Jersey.”  At the time, the state was home to dozens of craftsmen specializing in tall case clocks. Morven’s newest exhibition will examine the work of New Jersey clockmakers as they collaborated with cabinetmakers, ran shops, and formed professional partnerships to create beautiful timekeeping pieces.

Spanning the colonial and post-revolutionary period, clockmakers ran their shops with the assistance of apprentices and often enslaved labor. Some carried on the clockmaking tradition through several generations, often working multiple trades, including silversmithing.

This exhibition will feature over 50 tall case clocks, representing almost as many different clockmakers, from both private and public collections. These freestanding pendulum clocks are as functional as they are beautiful with faces made of intricate brass work or painted designs of objects like ships, suns, and moons. Internally, their complicated workings are mechanical masterpieces. Some even chime with contemporaneous melodies. 

Striking Beauty will be the first large-scale exhibition of its kind, exploring the experiences of the artisans and apprentices, free and enslaved, who contributed to this unique craft. Explore the five-gallery exhibition to see clocks from cities and towns such as Elizabeth, Newark, Burlington, Flemington, and Salem, and more. 

Lenders to the exhibition will include: Boxwood Hall, Brown University, Buccleuch Mansion Museum, Burlington County Historical Society, Gloucester County Historical Society, Hunterdon County Historical Society, Monmouth County Historical Association, Trenton Museum Society,  as well as loans from numerous private collections.