Geranium
Pelargonium inquinans
Native to Southern Africa, the geranium is a tender perennial, grown as a houseplant, with velvety green foliage studded with clusters of bright scarlet flowers throughout the year.
This species is believed to have been grown in the President's House while Jefferson lived there as the nation's third president.1
Upon Jefferson's retirement in 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington socialite, asked for one of Jefferson's geraniums and the departing president replied: "it is in very bad condition, having been neglected latterly as not intended to be removed. ... if plants have sensibility, as the analogy of their organisation with ours seems to indicate, it cannot but be proudly sensible of her [Mrs. Smith's] fostering attentions."2
Imported from South Africa into Britain by the early 1700s, this species geranium was an exciting novelty that became one of the parents of our modern bedding geraniums.3 Geraniums were popular enough in America by 1800 to be featured by Rembrandt Peale in his famous 1801 portrait of his brother Rubens.
The geranium is a tender perennial, grown as a houseplant, with velvety green foliage studded with clusters of bright scarlet flowers throughout the year.
Further Sources
- Adams, Denise Wiles. Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940. Portland, OR: Timber Press, Inc., 2004.
- Boyd, Julian P. A Geranium for Lyman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951. A farewell keepsake by Julian Boyd, editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, in honor of colleague Lyman Butterfield, recalling Jefferson's gift of a geranium to Margaret Bayard Smith.
- Leighton, Ann. American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
- McMahon, Bernard. The American Gardener's Calendar, 1806. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1997. See pp. 83, 160, 355, 419, and 444.
- National Gallery of Art. Peale, Rembrandt. Rubens Peale with a Geranium, 1801.
- Stuart, David and James Sutherland. Plants from the Past: Old Flowers for New Gardens. London: Penguin Books, 1989.
- Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.
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Footnotes
- Edwin M. Betts, Hazlehurst Bolton Perkins, and Peter J. Hatch, Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello, 3rd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 72-73.
- Jefferson to Smith, March 6, 1809, in PTJ:RS, 1:29. Transcription available at Founders Online.
- Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories (London: Black, 1968), 200.