This event has been canceled.

Fall is the perfect time for planting and the Monticello nursery will have a wide range of trees, shrubs, perennials, and bulbs, all on sale! Overstock items will be further discounted. Enjoy guided garden tours and ask our knowledgeable nursery staff your gardening questions. 

Culinary historian, writer and educator Dr. Leni Sorensen will present “The Little Spots Allowed:” Garden Production by the Enslaved Community at Monticello. Dr. Sorensen's talk is based on a close examination of African American slave gardenways and food production in the five-year record of vegetables, eggs and chickens sold to the Jefferson household by the enslaved community at Monticello.  Kept by Anne Cary Randolph, the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, the record offers a window into a world we rarely get to see so clearly. 

Learn about the “McIntire Botanical Garden: Past, Present and Future” with Jill Trischman-Marks, the garden’s Executive Director. Building a public botanical garden is not an easy feat, and as a gift from the community to the community, the McIntire Botanical Garden is a very ambitious project. This talk will briefly outline what has already been achieved in the process toward building this garden and will also give insight into the road map ahead.

9 a.m. - 2 p.m., Jefferson’s Tufton Farm · FREE; no registration required. GPS Address: 1293 Tufton Farm, Charlottesville, VA

Photo: SeraPetrasPhotography

Dr. Leni Sorensen was born in California, was a folksinger and a member of the cast of the musical HAIR, and at one time catered to movie crews and started a tamale business. She farmed for eight years in South Dakota and earned her MA/PhD from William & Mary. Retired from six years as the African American Research Historian at Monticello she lectures and writes on issues of food history and teaches rural life skills from her farmstead home in western Albemarle County. www.indigohouse.us

Jill Trischman-Marks is the Executive Director and chief cheerleader for the McIntire Botanical Garden. A landscape architect by training with more than 30 years of experience in the design and construction of gardens and outdoor spaces, Jill also has almost 20 years of practical business experience as the principal of her own design firm. She has been a resident of Charlottesville since 1989, when she moved here to pursue a graduate degree in landscape architecture and historic preservation at the University of Virginia.