Preservation at Scale: Great Significance of a Small Garden

expertise of Jane Baber White, a garden designer and author of Lessons learned from a Poet’s Garden: The Restoration of the Historic Garden of Harlem Renaissance Poet Anne Spencer, Lynchburg, Virginia. It was she who connected the Conservancy with this garden. “I had gone to a preservation conference that was sponsored by The Garden Conservancy and it was sort of a life-changing thing. I’d never been to anything like that,” she says in an interview for the Conservancy’s film documentation of the site. “The Garden Conservancy was a great help to us in advising on the garden.”

The Conservancy took up the cause after White contacted the organization in 2008. Over the years, its most important assistance to the Spencer garden has been its preservation planning, small grants, and continuing guidance and advice. The current documentation of the garden, thanks to the Suzanne and Frederic Rheinstein Fund for Garden Documentation, provides a new opportunity to chronicle its evolution from a home and intimate gathering space to a nationally important cultural landscape. To document this site, the Conservancy conducted interviews with experts in the fields of landscape architecture, garden design, historic preservation, museums, archives, literature, and community leaders.

We filmed among some of Anne Spencer’s original plantings to capture the authenticity of the garden. The fragrances and color from lush plantings underscored the experiential nature of a visit here. Filled with serenity, it felt as if we would encounter Anne Spencer herself tending to the garden while we meandered through this refuge of roses, anemones, a stone writing cottage, “Edenkraal” built by her beloved husband, Edward, a series of arbors, and a pond with a statue, “Prince Ebo,” gifted to her by W.E.B. Dubois.

“In documenting the garden, not only are we preserving Anne Spencer’s important legacy and providing educational opportunities, we are also helping the House and Garden Museum connect with a much larger audience. Engaging the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Trust for Historic Preservation in our documentation has been an important part of that process. Anne Spencer and her home and continued from page 1 garden have local, regional, and national significance,” says Pamela Governale, the Conservancy’s Director of Preservation.

Who Was Anne Spencer?

Annie Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer (rechristened “Anne” by her mentor, Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson, who thought it a better writer’s name) lived from 1882 to 1975 and was, by all accounts, a complex woman.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved father, Spencer’s parents worked on a plantation after getting married. As a child, she was a distinguished student, attending the Virginia Seminary at age eleven and graduating as valedictorian in 1899. She is best known as a poet, but she was also a librarian, teacher, community activist, civil rights advocate, wife, mother, and lest it be forgotten, a gardener. Spencer also helped establish the Lynchburg Chapter of the NAACP. Her home and garden were a sanctuary and cultural epicenter, where she hosted Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other important figures of the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights leaders of the 1920s and 30s. Anne Spencer would write in Edankraal, overlooking her garden, inspired by her plantings and nature in general. Spencer was known to write on any scrap of paper—including seed packets and nursery catalogs. Thirty of her poems were published while she was alive. Though she only published a small fraction of her poetry in her lifetime, her impact is lasting and remarkable. Spencer was the first African American woman poet to be featured in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973).

The Anne Spencer Garden Spencer’s garden, like her poetry, is being anthologized. The flowering of African American arts and culture that defined the Harlem Renaissance was reflected in Spencer’s garden as well as in her poetry. Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture Kevin Young says, “it is important for us to stay connected to…spaces like the Anne Spencer House and Garden

Museum because…it helps us think about the ways that history is found everywhere, and it is vibrant and evergreen, but it also requires tending to a much like a garden.” Public since 1985, its inclusion in The Garden Conservancy’s portfolio furthers its path to preservation.

There were keepers placed in Lynchburg, and they kept on keeping on. Spencer was the first. She moved in and began to create the garden in 1903 when she was twenty, raising her children there. The torch has been passed to her granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, Executive Director of the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum.

“If you want to understand any age and history, take a look at its gardens,” says Reuben Rainey, William Stone Weedon Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia, and co-author of Half My World: The Garden of Anne Spencer, a History and Guide. He continues,

“This is a chapter of American history that we need to know more about. The garden was her muse in many ways. A lot on a historic, black, middle-class block, its four varied “rooms” (see graphic) made it seem larger than its actual dimensions. The layout of the Anne Spencer garden is very, very sophisticated. I remember the first time I saw it and I thought, this is, this is quite an impressive garden,” says Rainey. It’s “...a design that expresses values.”

The garden itself is a linear set of four rooms defined by hedges and evergreens. Conservancy advisors who initially visited found it, “a highly original garden with a vivid sense of space and color. The mixed planting of herbaceous perennials, annuals, roses, and flowering shrubs create a rich tapestry of color that is complemented by ornaments made of found objects.”

Interviews conducted with Peggy Cornett, Curator of Plants at Monticello, underscored the personal connection Anne and her community felt for her garden. According to Cornett, “It’s telling a story of an individual and the people she was associated with… that’s what makes it very significant and very unique.” Rainey emphasized this point in his interview with the Conservancy saying, “it’s an extremely rare historic site. Beyond that, it’s a garden that is involved in the life of this community. It’s embedded in the civic life of Lynchburg…and makes us more aware of the richness of African American history and culture, much of which has been neglected or erased.”

Through her garden, Spencer created “a more ideal space than that which she encounters on a daily basis in Lynchburg,” says Noelle Morissette, Program Director of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina —Greensboro. The Anne Spencer House and Garden is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a designated Virginia landmark, and is the beating heart of the Pierce Street Renaissance Historic District, whose properties are important to history due to their associations “with the lives of persons significant in our past.”

Placing a Keeper…

Now, the Anne Spencer Garden has more “keepers” than ever. In addition to the individuals dedicated to its growth, institutional interest has more than stirred. “The Garden Conservancy has had a major impact on the preservation of the Anne Spencer Garden,” says SpencerHester, “and provided unbelievable opportunities for this small, sophisticated garden to continue to flourish, grow, and be shared with new audiences and generations.”

It is through our collective efforts to preserve and share a garden’s tangible and intangible heritage that we can capture a unique sense of place essential to understanding the layers of our history.

Senior Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Brent Leggs shares that, “It’s beautiful to see the power of vernacular gardens...it’s beautiful to present them to the public. Preserving sites of black activism, achievement, and resilience is fundamental to understanding our nation’s full history.”

It is not only the garden that endures. Everyone who visits remarks on the personal and intimate nature of the space. It’s not the plants. It’s not the artifacts.

“She is still here,” says White.