Poplar Forest - Thomas Jefferson's Other Garden
By Peter Loewer
Carolina Gardener, March/April 2005

Thomas Jefferson's beautiful estate at Monticello is one thing, but Poplar Forest, his plantation and villa just outside of Lynchburg, VA, is quite another.  Monticello is steeped in history and labeled pathways, formal gardens and pleasant shops, with people of all nations walking visiting the house and garden, trying for just a semblance of Jefferson's presence.

However, it is much easier to find Jefferson at Poplar Forest.  To sit alone on the small front porch of the unusual and stunning octagonal house on a warm summer's day, looking out onto the winding driveway lined with tulip poplars, one can almost sense the spirit of the man who built this house.  Two painted benches of Wedgwood green sit on each side of the double front doors, with the porch overlooking a large, roughly 48-foot diameter circular planting of boxwoods.

On another summer's day, this time back in 1811, Jefferson wrote a letter to his old friend Charles Willson Peale (best known as a painter of heroes from the days of the Revolution but also the founder of the first major museum in the United States, the Peale Museum in Baltimore).  Jefferson was a month shy of his 66th birthday and, although he looked to Monticello for the "cares of the garden and culture of curious plants uniting either beauty or utility," he also knew these same pursuits would engage his attentions at Poplar Forest.  "No occupation," he wrote, "is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.  Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year [and] though an old man, I am but a young gardener."

Early in 1813, Jefferson wrote about Poplar Forest to John Wayles Eppes (Jefferson's son-in-law): "I... have laid off a handsome curtilage connecting the house with the Tomahawk [Creek], have inclosed and divided it into suitable appendages to a Dwelling house, and have begun its improvement by planting trees of use and ornament."

At the center of the plantation stood the octagonal house surrounded by an ornamental landscape.  From his library of architectural books, Jefferson fed his fascination with octagons.  Although included in many of his designs, the house at Poplar Forest is the only octagonal structure Jefferson designed that was actually built.

The house and immediate grounds were part of the curtilage (an Old French word for the area surrounding a house) Jefferson wrote about, included 61 acres of enclosed landscape, the largest section of the domestic part of the farm.  The curtilage acted as the transition between the human domain and the agricultural fields with the contained orchards, vegetable gardens and farm buildings.  Beyond, were the fields for growing Jefferson's cash crops of tobacco and wheat.

Over the years, Poplar Forest underwent many alterations, starting as a 4,812-acre plantation and by late in the 20th century, dwindling to a mere 50 acres surrounded by subdivisions spawned by the march of Lynchburg's suburbs.

In 1980, a doctor from North Carolina bought the property in hopes of eventually selling the house and grounds to a preservation group.  Nobody offered to buy the historical gem, and time continued to take its toll on the site.

In late '83, some local residents formed The Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest, a nonprofit organization, and bought the property.  Three years later, Poplar Forest opened for tours.  After a surge of interest, the corporation was able to buy back 500 acres of the original plantation, and began the long effort to conserve and restore the house and then the landscape.

Archeological and historical research has identified many sites as barns, kitchens, slave quarters and all the other structures necessary to maintain a working farm in the 19th century.  One such structure built next to the kitchen garden back in 1830 was based on an idea that spans the centuries -- a sunken greenhouse or flower pit, where it functioned as a nursery for seedlings.  Sadly, it was abandoned and filled with trash in the early 20th century.

Jefferson had a keen knowledge of historical architecture, and his house was probably influenced by Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio's (1508-1580) three-part plan for a villa.  The plan included a central house with colonnaded wings on each side each ending in smaller structures with a taller, decorated roof.  In Jefferson's interpretation, two double rows of trees replaced the colonnades, each ending with a mound of soil, the earth taken from the house foundation and the creation of the sunken lawn.  He then planted each mound with weeping willows, golden willows and aspens.

Painstaking restoration began in 1993, and within five years the exterior of the house was back as it was 160 years before, and visitors could see the house as Jefferson had designed it.  Soon after completion, the National Trust for Historic Preservation selected the site for a 1998 National Preservation Honor Award.

The structural restoration of the interior space included 14 of the house's 15 fireplaces and their hearths, plus the installation of polished oak floors on the first level.  Eventually most of the other rooms where Jefferson lived will be plastered and covered in lime wash as they were in his day.  Plans now call for leaving one room "as is" with the original Jefferson brick showing, as requested by many visitors.

Restoration carpenters are now working on rebuilding the wing of service rooms on the east side of the house, originally torn down in the 1840s.  That project is scheduled for completion in 2006.

But this is essentially a gardening magazine, and to find out more about the landscape, after walking the grounds, I went to visit Barbara Heath, the director of archaeology and landscapes at Poplar Forest.  I asked her about landscapes features such as the signature tulip poplars and the curious serpentine brick wall out on the grounds.

"The serpentine rose garden," she answered, "was a salute by the last residents back in the 1950s, and it will eventually be removed.  But the young tulip poplars that regenerated in or were growing along the edge of the agricultural field were left in place to form a grove that dominated the north face of the house into the 20th century, and five trees stand on the site today.  There were others that dies since the 1980s, one dated by ring count to be from circa 1763 and the other dates to circa 1795.

"North of the house, an arc of road is all that remains today of the road Jefferson described in 1812 as '540 years round.' It enclosed the approximately five-acre heart of the pleasure grounds surrounding the house.  The boxwoods that line it and fill in the center are of undetermined age and have been a source of debate for many years.

"The planting consists of an outer ring of American box and an inner planting of concentric rings of English box, the plantings together defining the inner and outer circles of a carriage turn-around.  But while there are boxwoods documented on the property, no references survive to Jefferson's use of these plants at either Monticello or Poplar Forest."

Heath then explained how the diverse clues from planting beds, tree ring counts, pollen grains and drains linked with the rich documentary evidence that abounds at Poplar Forest allowed the archeological staff to piece together the original landscape of the villa.

"After all," she continued, "the design of Poplar Forest incorporated elements of both the modern and ancient world.  On the north side Jefferson reinterpreted contemporary garden fashion with groves, oval beds and clumps of trees.  Naturalistic and forward-looking, the north was a striking contrast with the landscape to the south, with its more open canvas and its linear and geometric layout dominated by the arcaded portico of the house."

Poplar Forest was Jefferson's retreat from the world.  Surrounded by the plants he was continually fascinated with, he simply enjoyed the solitude and connection with Mother Earth that every modern gardener feels in his or own garden.  Luckily, Poplar Forest was saved from the ravages of time and development, and it is a botanical and archeological treasure worth visiting -- after all, how often do you get to walk down the same garden path that Thomas Jefferson did?