Written By Lisa Breslin
On a recent Friday this fall, Hampstead resident Pat Brodowski replenished the garden soil with compost. She planted seeds: spinach, turnips, lettuce, and transplanted cauliflower and celery. She saved some for future crops and set aside okra and red peppers to dry for festive wreaths during the coming holidays.
But the familiar routine was far from ordinary.
Brodowski’s garden is no longer in Hampstead or at the Carroll County Farm Museum, where she performed extensive research into the propagation of heirloom vegetables.
Since May, the transplanted horticulturist (who owns an associate’s degree from Morrisville College and a B.A. in agriculture from Cornell) has been a member of the team at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s historic plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia. She moved from one 50-square-foot patch at the local farm museum to gardens measuring 50 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.
“I can’t see from one end of the garden to the other any more,” she said. “The volume we work with is breathtaking.”
Soon after the fall vegetable seeding, for example, the flower gardening team planted 3,000 tulips in an array of historic colors in the beds on the west lawn of the house.
Obviously, Brodowski’s life and work at Monticello are very different from what they were in Carroll County. In her brief time at the home of the nation’s third president, she has:
¥ Made a large bouquet of vegetables for Michelle Obama.
¥ Gathered vegetables and herbs from the Monticello garden – lovage, thyme, leeks, savoy cabbage, purple calabash tomatoes, carrots, beets, salsify, rosemary, mint, onions, potatoes, parsnips, tarragon – for Walter Staib, the chef at The City Tavern, Philadelphia, who was filming three episodes of cooking on the hearth in Monticello’s restored kitchen for a PBS series.
¥ Witnessed Monticello’s unique July 4th naturalization ceremony, the most moving Independence Day celebration she had ever experienced.
¥ Worked in the vegetable garden with USC graduate Daniel Seddiqui, 27, who is touring the U.S. and writing a book about doing 50 jobs for 50 weeks in 50 states.
For a woman who has always had an affinity for all things traditional and historic, tending the vegetables at Monticello is a dream job. Brodowski works with plants whose history is as rich as the soil in which they are rooted.
Archeologists and soil experts recently analyzed the soil underneath a felled tulip poplar that some believe may have been planted by Jefferson. They found virgin forest floor that dated before Jefferson moved in.
Pat Brodowski’s job offers the ideal mix of loam and luminaries.
Although it involves renting a house nearby and commuting to her Hampstead home when time permits, she knows that Monticello is her “once in a lifetime chance.”
“I’m doing all the things I’ve always loved to do,” she said, “but it’s here. I’m doing it here.”
