Tea at Trianon: White House Vegetable Gardens

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 5, 2015

White House Vegetable Gardens

A long tradition. From White House History:

Jefferson’s plan for a 168-foot long permanent vegetable garden was slow to be developed. Records indicate it was not surveyed and laid out until 1807-1808, so the president must have provisioned his kitchen from Monticello or from the local city markets to provide meat and produce for the large number of guests he entertained on an almost daily basis. By the summer of 1809 the garden southeast of the President’s House was finished and planted with vegetables. The list of vegetables included cabbage, broccoli, green and yellow Savoy, radish, endive, cucumber, carrot, beet, parsnip, turnip, and leek. The fate of the kitchen garden is unclear after the 1814 fire set by the British destroyed the White House and ruined the grounds. Redeveloping the president’s grounds would be a daunting task, and President James Monroe would hire Charles Bizet, a gardener who had fled France during the Revolution and worked at Montpelier for the Madisons. Bizet undoubtedly tended a vegetable garden, but his main duty was taken up by constant construction and earth moving to rebuild the presidential gardens and grounds. (Read more.)