The one thing to guard with your life is the bathroom key.
The second is your room key, and the third is your water bottle.
A week living in a college dorm sure puts the important things in life back into focus.
This wasn’t just any college dorm, either. It was the hallowed The Lawn at the University of Virginia. We were 18 enthusiastic gardeners and historians, mostly women, mostly cheerfully past middle age, privileged to attend Monticello’s Historic Landscape Institute.
The Lawn has been the symbolic center of UVA since the school was founded in 1819. The glorious Rotunda is at the north end, opposite Old Cabel Hall. The actual grassy lawn between them covers almost 5 acres, and pavilions line each side of the lawn. The pavilions hold 54 single rooms for students, nine apartments for professors and some hotels and clubs for alumni and others.
Collectively that all makes up Academical Village on 34 acres, the heart of the 1,600-acre UVA campus, which was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson.
Among local people who lived on The Lawn during their senior years at UVA were Michael Scales and Jim Eanes. This week it’s me: a set of bunk beds (of course I took the lower one, which is meant to serve double duty as a sofa), two wardrobes – one which I almost didn’t discover had inside, thank goodness, a sink!), two large pieces of storage and desk furniture, a chair, a rocking chair and, believe it or not, true to its time, a real wood-burning fireplace. The star of the show was the cumbersome air conditioning unit which was the size of a small dresser and connected to the window with tubing – but everyone was relieved to have one, especially considering that Lawn residents did without until just a couple of years ago.
Creating UVA was Jefferson’s retirement project after he had served as the nation’s third president, from 1801-1809. Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers, wrote the Declaration of Independence – when he was 33. We learned about the process and even saw his early drafts of it, complete with cross-outs and rewrites.
We learned about the founding of America, horticulture discoveries and research, archaeology, historic preservation and much more.
We also took sessions at UVA, the Anne Spencer Museum and Garden in Lynchburg (Spencer was a Henry County native!), Poplar Forest and Morven Farm-UVA Sustainability Lab.
We did all of that wearing our name tags and our hallowed bathroom key-cards around our necks on a lanyard. To get to the bathroom, you have to leave and lock your room, walk way down through the pavilions, take a few turns to reach the back of the building, go down some stairs and hold your key-card to the sensor.
By day, our minds were occupied by lofty matters such as the forming of a nation.
By night it was thoughts such as: Should I have a drink after supper which might make me wake up to go to the bathroom? (No) and Is it OK to wear my pajamas instead of changing clothes each time I need to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom? (Yes).
Bathroom jokes and disclaimers aside – no one was forced to stay on The Lawn; it is a privilege included in the cost of tuition, and people could stay in a hotel – it’s a great experience.
If you like horticulture, or history, or both, look it up – Historic Landscape Institute at Monticello. The application period opens in late winter.
No matter your passions, there are classes, workshops and events about it, both local and far away. There is nothing so invigorating, refreshing and fulfilling as joining with others of a like mind to immerse in the topic of interest.
Take a break from the daily grind to join the world of wonder every now and then.
