The Gardener Who Came Back to Monticello

When Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, his beloved gardens at Monticello fell into ruin. The terraced vegetable beds that once held 330 varieties of vegetables became choked with weeds. The orchards he had carefully grafted — peach, apple, cherry — went unpruned and wild. For over a century, the vine rows and flower beds that Jefferson had mapped with meticulous precision in his Garden Book simply disappeared beneath neglect. Visitors in the 1900s found barely a trace of what had been one of America's most remarkable gardens.

Then in 1979, archaeologist William Kelso began excavating. Beneath the overgrowth, he found the original garden footprint still intact — stone walls, planting beds, even root systems waiting in the soil. The restoration took decades of patient work, but today Monticello's gardens bloom again almost exactly as Jefferson designed them.

Psalm 80 is the cry of a people who feel like that abandoned garden. God had transplanted His vine from Egypt, cleared the ground, and watched it flourish until it "sent out its boughs to the Sea." But now the walls are broken down. Wild boars ravage it. The vineyard lies exposed and dying.

Yet the psalmist does not cry out to a stranger. He appeals to the same Gardener who planted the vine in the first place: "Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see." The roots remain. The Gardener knows exactly where He planted them. Restoration begins when we call Him back to the work only He can do.