Peter Hatch

As Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Peter J. Hatch has been responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello since 1977. He also oversees numerous educational programs, including the Garden Tours (for 35,000 annual visitors); the Saturdays in the Garden program of natural history walks, lectures, and horticultural workshops; the Historic Landscape Institute, a two week field school for students from around the nation; and the Evening Conversations series which honors the legacy of Thomas Jefferson with after-hours symposia on a variety of topics. He is the author of The Gardens of Monticello, the editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello (University Press of Virginia), and has written numerous articles, and lectured in thirty-five states, on Jefferson and the history of garden plants. His scholarly study of early American pomology, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson and the Origins of American Horticulture, was published by the University Press of Virginia in 1999. It was a Selection of the Garden Book Club.