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.