Page:The Bloom of Monticello (1926).pdf/44

 There was no son at Monticello, but the first grandson at an early age was bundled off to Philadelphia to attend lectures in botany, astronomy and anatomy, for "botany was ranked by the head of the family as the most valuable of the sciences"; and the celebrated Dr. Benjamin A. Barton, the author of the first American textbook on the subject, was chosen as instructor, because, as Mr. Jefferson explained, he had the chastest style of gardening outside of England. Of England he wrote, "The gardening in that country is the one thing in which it excels all the earth."

Money troubles that overtook him in the presidency, kept at his heels to the end, and he was brought face to face in old age with one loss after another. His large holdings of land, which originally included Elkhill on the James, the Natural Bridge tract, Monticello, Poplar Forest in Bedford county, Tufton, Lego, Pantops, Clover Fields and Shadwell, were gradually reduced. His happiness was found in the family growing up around him: Anne, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, Mary, Septimia, and along with Thomas Jefferson Randolph, four Randolph boys, bearing the names of James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Meriwether Lewis and George Wythe, and Francis Eppes, son of his beloved Maria, long since gone. His highest thought for the boys was an education, and land that would make farmers of them, if they so desired.

One of the granddaughters, in later years, recalled the planting of the first hyacinths and tulips at Monticello. "The roots arrived labeled each one with a fancy name. There was Marcus Aurelius, and the King of the Gold Mine, the Roman Emperor, and the Queen of the