is so much more pleasant than clambering the ropes as a seaman; and my confidence in the skill and activity of those employed to run the vessel is so entire that I notice nothing en passant, but how smoothly she runs."
His health was good and being constantly improved by the life he was leading. His letters in old age are full of farm news and talk. Writing to Gen. John H. Cocke in regard to the University of Virginia, sending seeds of pumpkin and asparagus, he said, "If you have any sea kale to spare, I will thank you for some to replenish my bed." To Madison he wrote: "I promised your gardener some seed, which I put under separate cover."
When the question of the introduction of the study of botany was discussed for the University of Virginia, he was not caught napping. For more than twenty years, as an old man, he wrote his good old friend, Thonin, Superintendent of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, had regularly sent him a box of seeds of such exotics as would suit the Virginia climate. "These I regularly sent the public and private gardens of the other states," he said, and these sources he knew he could draw on then for supply.
Jefferson joined horticultural societies at home and abroad, cultivated the friendship of scientists, cherished his Hepburn garden book after the manner of garden lovers today, and was often consulted as an authority. He was constantly exchanging roots and plants and cuttings. No day was too busy for him to be sending them abroad by messenger or mail, for he literally scattered seed broadcast throughout the country.
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