ing tree, with a view of a nearby apple tree. Beyond a screen of more trees
were Wythe’s carriage house, a stable, and a big cornfield.
There is much to recommend right angles and straight lines in the cul-
tivation of vegetables and other food plants. How to distinguish between
young desired plants and weeds, otherwise? How else to cultivate, fertilize,
and protect one’s designs? The perfect circles, half-circles, triangles, and
other geometrical fancies common to French-style pleasure gardens are
another matter. Before Thomas Jefferson was born, Alexander Pope lacer-
ated the French gardening fashion and campaigned for decades to create
a distinctively English design for gardens. Ultimately the English garden
evolved as studied asymmetry, the best examples set on large scales, where
broad landscapes are rearranged to imitate nature. Thereafter, I think, it
was impossible to view a formal French-style garden without feeling the de-
sign mocked nature with hubris. We humans are masters of all—science of
every sort—and capable (given sufficient labor) of reforming nature to re-
flect Enlightenment perfection. Jefferson loved the French and spoke their
language, but he read his Pope (and others), visited English gardens, and
over many years created at Monticello a combination of practical, right-
angled vegetable gardens among contoured, vista-oriented, almost asym-
metrical ornamentals.^15
Later, nineteenth- and twentieth-century planters and businesspeople
created informal ‘‘English’’ gardens on their properties, displaying their
curiosities and powers of procurement with trees from Asia and the Ameri-
can tropics as well as native and European specimens. Humans seem in-
capable of leaving nature alone but must transport plants (as well as ani-
mals) and test them in new habitats, for profit or novelty or both, and much
more. Pleasure gardens are one version of what Michael Pollan and others
have called ‘‘second nature’’—the first being wilderness.^16 All versions of
second nature, vegetable patches no less than the formal gardens of Boboli,
Versailles, and Tryon, are arranged and tended intensively. Design signifies
much, as already suggested, of human ambition and attitude. The Indian
midden and, later, the kitchen gardens of African slaves and the wives of
herdsmen and yeomen—great jumbles of corn, beans, peas, squashes, and
herbs by harvesttime—would seem the opposite, aesthetically, of the sym-
metrical French pleasure garden. The English-style park-landscape, offer-
ing the illusion of nature’s asymmetry if not the seeming chaos of the mid-
den, was, it seems to me, a pleasant compromise. All were brilliant and
useful human accomplishments, all with fine aesthetic virtues. Too, one