America's Crop Heritage


 For a period of twenty-three years, Jefferson received annually
a box of seeds from his friend Thouin, Superintendent of the
Garden of Plants at Paris, containing exotic plants thought suit-
able for the Virginia climate. Jefferson sent these seeds to public
and private gardens in other states for many years, but in 1826 he
proposed that they be utilized by a new school of botany at the
University of Virginia. He also suggested that a botanical garden
be started, and proposed that the professor make a list of trees and
plants to be introduced before taking measures to secure them.
 Promotion of Rice-Jefferson regarded his efforts to introduce
the olive and the dry, or upland rice, as his most worth-while
achievements in plant introduction. While in Paris in 1787, he
became interested in rice after seeing large quantities consumed
in France. He traveled to southern France to study the agriculture
and to secure the Piedmont rice grown in Lombardy. Jefferson
considered it different from the rice grown in the Carolinas and
hoped to increase the demand for rice by increasing the varieties
in the markets. At the same time, he secured rice seeds from the
Levant at Marseilles and forwarded these to America. When he
learned of the dry rice, he made arrangements to get some from
Cochin, China, for trial "the young Prince of that country. .having
undertaken that it shall come to me." (5)
 Jefferson shipped a quantity of Egyptian rice seed to Charleston
in 1788. He dispatched two shipments, hoping that at least one
of them would arrive unspoiled and in time for planting. Two
years later, Jefferson secured a barrel of heavy upland rice from
equatorial Africa. He hoped the upland varieties might replace
the wet rice and the malarial pestilence that accompanied its
cultivation. From Charleston some of the upland rice was sent to
Georgia. In reviewing his plant introductions shortly before his
death, Jefferson recalled that his rice had spread over upper
Georgia, but he did not know to what extent it came to be
grown in South Carolina. (6)
 Next to a grain for bread, Jefferson considered an oil crop as
especially worthy of introduction into a new country. "The olive
is a tree the least known in America, and yet the most worthy
of being known. Of all the gifts of heaven to man, it is next to
the most precious, if it be not the most precious." He was impressed
with the pervasiveness of the olive in Mediterranean cookery and
thought that it might claim a preference even to bread. Jefferson
thought the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture in South