Jefferson's memorable letter to his daughter, announcing his decision to defer his retirement from Washington's cabinet at a time of political turmoil, declared, "The ensuing year will be the longest of my life. The next we will sow our cabbages together." When the time came for his retirement as President, and he was packed and started on his way with three wagonloads of stuff, one of them loaded down with shrubbery, his papers reveal that among his farewell purchases were seed for Scotch cabbage, loaf lettuce, white snaps, garlic and Hanover turnips.
Jefferson, in a letter to Washington, disclaiming in high dudgeon any part in a newspaper attack on a well-known Virginian soldier, and bringing to the notice of the Chief Executive the damaging facts in regard to treatment he supposed himself to have received, took occasion to say: "I put away this disgusting dish of old fragments and talk to you of my peas and clover. . . . I verily believe that a field of thirty-five acres sowed in wheat in April this twelvemonth has given me a ton to the acre at the first cutting this spring. I shall hereafter put peas into the broadcast, proposing that one of my sowings of wheat shall be after two years of clover and the other one after two years of peas."
He strove hard to share with his family his love for trees and flowers. To his little motherless Maria, he wrote, "There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me." Again he wrote Maria, "I hope our correspondence will now be more regular; that you will be no more lazy, and I no more on the pouts on that account." Bidding her note every appearance, animal and vegetable, that showed the approach of spring, and communicate them to him, he
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