growing up around her at Monticello, he wrote, "I congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a supreme being—or as a being that will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs. I shall hope that the multiplication of cedar in the neighborhood and of trees and shrub around the house will attract more of them."
Anne Cary Randolph, the oldest of these Randolph children, the number of whom ran into almost a round dozen, finally, when all were present or accounted for, became the mistress of her grandfather's garden in his absence, and saw to it, with the help of old Wormeley, the head gardener, and Bacon, the overseer, that his commissions were carried out.
To Bacon, his overseer for twenty years, he wrote, "If the weather is not open and soft when Davy arrives, put the box of thorns into the cellar, where they may be entirely free from the influence of cold, until the weather becomes soft, when they must be planted in the places of those dead through the whole of the hedges which enclose the two orchards. . . . If any remain, plant them in the nursery of thorns. There are 2,000."
Again: "Wormeley must be directed to weed the flower beds about the house, the nursery, the vineyards and raspberry beds." And still again: "Keep the thorns constantly wed."
Carts journeyed back and forth between the Capital and the old Virginia homestead carrying fine things to Washington for the President's table, and returned loaded down
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