BUILDINGS & Grounds Report

Garden Guild

We have an enthusiastic, knowledgeable group of over 20 parishioners who give their time, talent, and labor to care for the many plantings on the campus.

Our goal for 2022 was the renewal of the gardens of the Trinity courtyard to reflect our need to create a spiritual greeting for those all who visit our landmarks grounds in Northern Virginia.

In order to continue with the theme that Mrs. Mellon preferred and one that we subscribe to nothing should be noticed we heavily researched the original landscape designs, photographs and details that were ordered by her for the creation of our beautiful campus. We did this research in the basement of the church, the church offices, and traveled to the National Archives at the Smithsonian, as well as to Oak Spring Foundation archives at Rokeby in Upperville.

To that end, we renovated the front entrance of the church by adding two disease resistant pyracantha bushes of the variety “Mohave” to flank the entrance door, as Mrs. Mellon had originally designed and installed. We also replaced the overgrown holly tree with another disease resistant variety which has lovely blooms and abundant berries, “Red Dragon.” You might have noticed that this tree was decorated with white lights for Christmas.

We installed a mock orange tree “Snow White”. Again, this is a plant favored by Mrs. Mellon and is used in her family’s area of our cemetery. Mock orange is notable in that it is biblically known as “Crown of Thorns”.

We installed a camelia bush “April Kiss,” which is a pink bloom variety to continue the rhythm of pink bloomers in the courtyard.

We completed the courtyard circle with a continuation of the boxwood and Asian grasses that had been planted in the beds adjacent to the entrance of the Bishop’s Garden. We planted over 200 purple allium bulbs “Globemaster” which will greet all with their large, purple blooms on bright green stems.

With help and funds supplied by the Upperville Garden Club, and with help by enthusiastic neighbors, we planted over 1000 daffodil bulbs in the medians adjacent to the church and the village.

We continued to prune, fertilize, mulch and weed existing trees and woody stemmed plantings on the campus.

We removed a diseased tree adjacent to the library which threatened that structure.

We all look forward to Spring when these plantings will come to life with pink, yellow, purple and white blossoms.

“Our goal for 2022 was the renewal of the gardens of the Trinity courtyard to reflect our need to create a spiritual greeting for those all who visit our landmarks grounds in Northern Virginia.”