Page:The Bloom of Monticello (1926).pdf/36

 of laying off his flower beds, under the west windows of the mansion. Attention has been called to a plan now in the Massachusetts Historical Society looking to a formal garden with rectangles reaching out, showing long, narrow plots to the right and left of the white colonnade of the west front of the house.

One of three stray sheets from an account book, to be found today in the Pennsylvania Historical Society, shows a plat indicating the exact positonposition [sic] of the flowers planted on the west lawn in April, 1807, during one of Mr. Jefferson's spring visits to Monticello while he was President. It is drawn by his own hand and seems to end further controversy. In accordance with the somewhat recently discovered journal of Francis Galley Gray, a young New Englander, who visited Mr. Jefferson in 1814, the flowers and shrubs were planted in rectangular plots, and rare and ornamental trees were planted at the corners of the house and on the borders of the mountain.

An old picture, now in the possession of Mrs. T. Jefferson Coolidge and supposed to have been painted in the fall of 1825 or the spring preceding the death of Mr. Jefferson, shows two rectangular plots spread out directly in front of the house, with others at right angles extending at the extreme ends further out into the lawn. Shrubbery and flowers, shown growing broadcast on the lawn, and thick double lines of growing trees at either side of the house, seem to dispose of the idea of a formal garden near the mansion. A chart of Mr. Jefferson's while President bears out the idea of trees at the side of the house. "Four purple beeches" he later directed "be placed in the southwest and northwest angles of the house to replace others then