The third program in the 2026 Grand Homes and Gardens series, Freedom at Home: Telling the Full Story of America’s Founding Homes & Gardens, featuring gardens of Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia with speaker Peter Hatch, Gardener, Historian, and Emeritus Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Peter J. Hatch is a gardener and historian living in Albemarle County, Virginia, where he gardens, lectures, consults, and writes about garden history. The Emeritus Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Hatch was responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello from 1977 to 2012.
Peter Hatch also conceived and oversaw numerous educational programs, including Monticello Garden Tours (for 35,000 annual visitors); the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a unique nursery selling and preserving garden varieties and species from our past; the Saturdays in the Garden program of natural history walks, lectures, and horticultural workshops; and the Historic Landscape Institute, a two week field school for students from around the nation.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” and the Monticello vegetable garden, a 1,000-foot-long terrace, became an experimental laboratory, an Ellis Island of new and unusual edible plants from around the world. Jefferson was a strong believer in a vegetable diet, and this revolutionary garden inspired a revolutionary cuisine in the kitchen at Monticello. The Jefferson legacy in food, wine, and gardening is profound — setting a strong foundation and high standard for the farm to table movement today.
Mostly restored today to the early nineteenth century, Monticello’s gardens feature extensive flower beds, a terraced vegetable garden, and orchards of fruit trees. Much of the work constructing, cultivating, and maintaining the gardens would have fallen to enslaved labor. Thomas Jefferson enslaved over six hundred people throughout his life.
Hatch is the author of four books on Thomas Jefferson, and he has lectured in thirty-eight states on Monticello and the history of garden plants. Hatch’s book on the Monticello vegetable garden of Jefferson’s retirement years, A Rich Spot of Earth’ Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (Yale University Press), received the American Horticultural Society’s Best Book Award for 2012.
In 2011, he received The Garden Club of America’s Medal in Historic Preservation, the first horticulturist to receive the award, and in 2012, Peter Hatch was awarded the Flora Ann Bynum medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Southern Garden History Society.
The March 26 Morven Museum program begins at 6:30 pm and is $10 for Morven members, $20 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.morven.org/events/grandhomes-thomas-jefferson
