The Elizabeth Lawrence Garden

Charlotte, NC

The most iconic photograph of Elizabeth Lawrence shows her opening her garden gate under an arch of Clematis armandii, with a soft smile and her hand extended, welcoming viewers as she greeted visitors for many years. Thanks to her graceful and prolific writing and to the remarkable efforts to preserve her Charlotte, NC, garden, it continues to welcome guests on her behalf today. The Elizabeth Lawrence Garden is small, a very modest city lot. But what it lacks in size it makes up for in stature. Though one-third the size of her earlier garden in Raleigh, it is packed with hundreds of different plants from all over the world. Her main goal was to find all the best growing plants for her conditions. She was sanguine about her efforts: “I cannot help it if I have to use my own house as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a garden,” she once wrote.

It is well-chronicled that Lawrence was the first woman to graduate in landscape architecture from North Carolina State College (now North Carolina State University). Less known is that in the same year (1933) she began her prolific garden writing career with an article in Garden Gossip. Her “laboratory” was created, in part, to provide source material for books during her lifetime, and for pieces that were collected and published posthumously. It informed hundreds of articles, columns, and lectures to garden clubs everywhere.

The garden is set up in a grid, but planted so profusely it hardly mattered. The diversity of plants also made it a classroom for visitors, a place to get schooled in plants and gardening in the South. People came not just to enjoy, but to learn.

And then, after decades, it was time to move on. This is when serendipity took over. Lawrence, in declining health, moved to Maryland to be near a niece. Her property was sold, then sold again three years later to Mary Lindemann (“Lindie”) Wilson, without much knowledge of the significance of the property or its earlier owner.

Not long after, famous gardeners from other parts of the world began ringing her bell to visit, including Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter! It didn’t take long for Wilson to figure out she had something special, and she dedicated her life to maintaining the garden and its plants. Ultimately those efforts led to the Garden Conservancy who helped put together a preservation plan and provides ongoing resources to keep the garden a Lawrence-inspired laboratory of plants for Southern gardens.

Purchased by the Wing Haven Foundation in 2008, the property is now protected by a conservation easement held by the Garden Conservancy and has its own curator. It is a ‘rehabilitation’ project rather than a restoration. It is managed to meet changing conditions while retaining the properties historic character, not as a snapshot in time. Part of that character is the garden’s continually evolving plant palette and planting scheme. “You have not seen my garden...,” Lawrence is quoted as replying to a guest excited to tell her friends about her visit, “you have only seen it today.”

Everybody wins...and Elizabeth would be happy.