Livestream - Restoring Monticello's Flower Gardens

Gardening has a long and fascinating history at Monticello. During Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, his meticulous plans for landscape and plantings were carried out by skilled enslaved gardeners like Wormley Hughes. Yet, in the century after Jefferson’s death, changes in ownership and outright neglect left very little evidence of those original designs and plantings. Restoring the gardens may not have happened in the twentieth century if it had not been for an instrumental group: the Garden Club of Virginia.

The event will be livestreamed below, on Facebook, and on YouTube on May 24, 2022.

In celebration of Historic Garden Week in Virginia, join us on Tuesday, April 19th, at 1 pm EDT for a livestream on the restoration of the gardens at Monticello Monticello’s Curator of Plants, Peggy Cornett, will be joined in conversation with Monticello’s Director of Gardens & Grounds Emeritus, Peter Hatch, and a member of the Garden Club of Virginia Restoration Committee. We’ll discuss the decades of partnership between Monticello and the Garden Club of Virginia, and the significant impact it has had on mountaintop.

Related Podcast: Restoring Monticello's Flower Gardens

In this episode of our In the Course of Human Events podcast, Monticello’s Curator of Plants, Peggy Cornett—with help from colleagues Monticello Senior Historian Ann Lucas and guide Elizabeth Lukas—tells the story of how two relatively young organizations, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation and the Garden Club of Virginia, worked together to restore Jefferson’s unique vision for his flower gardens and laid the groundwork for future historic landscape restoration projects at Monticello and elsewhere across the United States.