Snapdragon
Antirrhinum majus
Introduced around the globe, this southern European native has been a favorite garden plant for centuries. Snapdragons are ubiquitous in gardens today, just as they were in Jefferson's time. Also known as snap-dragon, Calves’ Snout, and Lion’s Mouth.
On May 28, 1767 Jefferson observed "Snap-dragon" blooming at Shadwell, his childhood home.1 and four years later, he listed this native of southern Europe among the hardy flowers to be naturalized in a "shrubbery" at Monticello.2 Jefferson's reference is the earliest known mention of this plant in an American source .3
This southern European native has been cultivated in American gardens since the mid-18th century. Philadelphia nurseryman Bernard McMahon included the "Common Snapdragon" in his 1806 The American Gardener's Calendar as a biennial flower.4 By the mid-1800s, many snapdragon cultivators had developed a variety of colors and forms. In 1890, however, Peter Henderson noted in his Henderson's Handbook of Plants and General Horticulture that "this plant, in its wild state, is very commonly found growing on the tops of old walls."5 It became a favorite for Victorian bedding schemes.6
The Snapdragon is an excellent example of a flower whose appearance has changed little in three hundred years, and Jefferson's Snapdragon might have been the purple-flowering species that now grows wild throughout southern Europe. The snapdragon is a summer-blooming flower grown as an annual with deep wine-red blossoms on upright stems.
The snapdragon grown in the restored Monticello gardens today was obtained in 1985 through a friendship between Monticello and the gardeners at Hatfield House, a sixteenth-century country estate outside London, England. The name “Calves’ Snout” being due to the shape of the seedpods, which John Gerard compared to “the bones of a Sheep’s head that hath been long in the water, or the flesh consumed cleane away.” The Latin name, Antirrhinum, translates to “rhinoceros’ nose.”
- Peggy Cornett, updated 2026
In Bloom at Monticello is made possible by support from The Richard D. and Carolyn W. Jacques Foundation.
Further Sources
- Coats, Alice M. Flowers and Their Histories. London: Black, 1968. See pp. 24-25.
- Dutton, Joan Parry. Plants of Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1979.
- Look for more of Jefferson's references in his garden book. Manuscript and transcription available online at Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society.
- Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.
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Footnotes
- Betts, Garden Book, 5. Manuscript and transcription of Jefferson's garden book at the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. See also 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), 53.
- Betts, Garden Book, 27.
- Denise Wiles Adams, Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940 (Portland, OR: Timber Press, Inc., 2004), 169; Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 479.
- Bernard McMahon, The American Gardener's Calendar: 1806 (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 1997), 291, 292, and 344.
- Peter Henderson, Henderson's Handbook of Plants and General Horticulture (New York: P. Henderson & Co., 1890), 26.
- David Stuart and James Sutherland, Plants from the Past: Old Flowers for New Gardens (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 79.