The Hermitage, Home of Old Hickory

by Stanley F. Horn

A short time before the Hermitage was built the General, accompanied by Rachel, visited in Washington on official business; and on this occasion they made the pilgrimage to Mount Vernon. Jackson was obviously much impressed by his visit to the old home of George Washington, so much so that he left in his papers a written memorandum of his impressions aroused by his journey to what he described as “the venerable dwelling of the patriarch of our liberties.”

It is only a speculation, of course, but it is interesting to entertain the fancy that it was perhaps as a result of this visit that the old General, upon his return to Tennessee, decided to build for himself a home more in keeping with the dignity of the position he had attained as a national hero. Perhaps Rachel herself suggested it to him. She was proud of the General and the distinctions he had gained; maybe she put the thought in his head that the Hero of New Orleans ought not to be receiving his guests in a log house, that he should live in a little more style—something approaching the quiet dignity of Mount Vernon, which they both admired. A new house they should have—and, of course, by all means, a garden.

At any rate, we find in the old General’s memorandum of his Mount Vernon trip the following reference: “A neat little flower garden, laid out and trimmed with the utmost exactness, ornamented with green and hot houses in which flourish the most beautiful of the tropical plants, affords a happy relief to the solemn impressions produced by a view of the antique structure it adjoins, and leads you insensibly into the most delightful reverie, in which you review in imagination the manner in which the greatest and the best of men, after the most busy and eventful life, retired into privacy and amused the evening of his days.” And so, when the Hermitage mansion house was built in 1819, we find close by its side “a neat little flower garden, laid out and trimmed with the utmost exactness;” and, although it is difficult to picture the tempestuous old warrior puttering about a flower garden, his correspondence reveals that thoughts of it occupied a part of his attention throughout his lifetime, and contemporaries have recalled that he had more than the average man’s interest in the flowers, particularly admiring the roses and the pinks.

That the garden was no mere afterthought or casual incidental to the building of the house is shown by the fact that in 1819 he engaged, evidently for the task of laying it out and planting it, an English professional gardener named William Frost, reputed at that time to be one of the best gardeners in the metropolis of Philadelphia. The best was none too good for Rachel in those days.

During his long absence from home during his two terms as President, Jackson’s correspondence is liberally sprinkled with references to his garden. In all the great difficulty he experienced in obtaining the services of competent or satisfactory overseers, one of his criticisms of them was that they were derelict in their care of the garden—Rachel’s garden. And in May, 1835, when his son wrote him relative to the good conduct of the new overseer most recently engaged he replied: “How I am delighted to hear that the garden has regained its former appearance that it always possessed whilst your dear mother was living, and that just attention is now paid to her monument. This is truly pleasing to me, and precisely as it ought to be.”

In May, 1832, in a letter to his son’s young wife General Jackson wrote: “I sincerely regret the ravages made by the frost in the garden, and particularly that the willow by the gate is destroyed. This I wish you to replace. The willows around the tomb I hope are living, and a branch from one of these might replace the dead one at the garden gate. It will grow if well watered and planted on receipt of this.” But it didn’t grow—or else the youthful Sarah neglected to plant it; and it was not until 1925 that a member of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association ran across this letter of the General’s and decided that, better late than never, his wishes should be carried out. The willows at the tomb—the willows General Jackson had himself planted nearly a century before—are now dead and gone, probably crowded and shaded to death by the stately old magnolias that now guard the plot of graves. But a scion was taken from another willow on the place and today the young willow may be seen there at the garden gate, belatedly replacing the one destroyed by the late frost in the spring of 1832.

The garden plot occupies an acre of ground, surrounded by a high picket fence built of enduring Tennessee red cedar. The fence is of the old substantial type, constructed of pointed pickets mortised with precision into the horizontal sustaining members, and entrance is gained through an old-fashioned wooden gate, reached by a short brick walk from the door on the eastern side of the house.

Inside the garden, eight feet from the fence, the plot is encircled by a gravel walk about six feet wide, and similar bisecting walks cut the garden into four plots. In the center the walks converge on a geometrically designed system of concentric circular beds in which annuals bloom from year to year. Roses climb on the fence, and shrubbery is planted along the sides of the walks, the central portion of each of the four plots now being kept in grass. In the middle of the north side is the original brick tool house, the path to which is shaded by an old rustic rose arbor; and peeping out between the box bushes and crape myrtles may be seen an occasional moss rose or other old-fashioned plant.

We do not find here the hothouses with their tropical plants which the General and Rachel so much admired at Mount Vernon; but evidently an effort was made to introduce unusual shrubbery into the garden, for in addition to the customary plants found in a Southern garden of the period there are to be seen some of the more rare and exotic shrubs—fig trees brought from the far South, a pink magnolia from Japan, etc.

The planning and arrangement of the planting is such that it provides attractions the whole year round. There are flowers throughout the blooming season from early spring to late fall; then there are the brightly colored leaves of the bushes and trees; and during the winter there is the glossy green foliage of magnolias and the faintly scented box bushes beside the garden paths, the barrenness of the flower beds at that season being relieved by the sweet-scented winter honeysuckle which defies the seasons and blooms in December and January as though it were mid-summer. The Hermitage garden is never without its attractive features.