Hop is the flower of the month for October and means injustice in the Victorian Language of Flowers. Hop, Humulus lupulus, was used as a medicinal herb in ancient Egypt and Rome. Beer making began in Bavaria, where the earliest known hop garden was established in 736.

The hop is the female flower, a cone-like catkin called a strobile. Susan painted hops with its green palmate leaves and yellowish-green stroibiles, twining up three gray hop poles, and surrounded by the lines from Jefferson's letter in brown and a border of green and brown.

"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year."
  ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter, August 20, 1811, Poplar Forest

Jefferson wrote these famous lines about gardening in a letter to Charles Willson Peale, from Poplar Forest, his farm in Bedford County, Virginia. Hop production began in 1794 at Jefferson's Monticello.

"Hops"
Text by Thomas Jefferson

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