The Garden Conservancy News

Preservation at Scale: Great Significance of a Small Garden

By Carlo A. Balistrieri

Beauty and hope can flower despite the environment and the times. When that happens, the experience can be transcendent. A garden in these circumstances, even a small, private, and very personal garden can take on meaning much greater than its humble beginnings.

The Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum on Pierce Street in Lynchburg, Virginia, is The Garden Conservancy’s smallest garden partner. Fortunately, the Conservancy recognized and embraced the site’s huge importance and welcomed the petite garden into its fold in 2008.

“The Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum is unique, and we are pleased to contribute to its preservation,” says Conservancy President and CEO James Brayton Hall. “It is rare for a historic house and garden to survive. It is especially rare for the house and garden of an African American.” Not only is it a museum and a garden, but it provides a meaningful opportunity to learn about the history of America at an important and pivotal time.

The garden is significant as the home and creation of a renowned Harlem Renaissance poet and civil rights advocate, Anne Spencer. On a lot only 45x125 feet, it is a far cry from the sprawling splendor usually associated with a “great garden,” but it became an integral site for an entire community of African American creatives, thought leaders, and advocates in the early 20th century. Spencer’s garden is “the only known intact house museum and restored garden of an African American in the United States,” wrote Spencer’s granddaughter Shaun Spencer-Hester in #GardenPreservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy (The Garden Conservancy, 2021).

Before the Conservancy came along, efforts were being made to restore and preserve Spencer’s legacy by Spencer’s son, Chauncey Spencer, who enlisted the continued on page 5