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Ladies Who Launch

The Garden Club of Virginia gets things done. For nearly eight decades, its Historic Garden Week has helped to revive properties both celebrated and forgotten.

4/14/10 5:27 PM

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Courtesy of the Garden Club of Virginia

Late April means Historic Garden Week, where estates from Roanoke to Williamsburg welcome the curious public for house and garden tours. And it’s more than grandmas with big purses and sensible shoes, mincing their way among ancient box. Likewise, Garden Week’s creator, the Garden Club of Virginia, is much more than ladies who lunch. Certainly more than “nosy, meddling women,” as legislators once described club members, or “scenic sisters” (this from billboard advertisers) or “a threat to progress” (utility companies, decrying the GCV’s efforts against power lines marring the landscape).

Courtesy of the Garden Club of Virginia

Kenmore, the Garden Club of Virginia's first restoration thanks to funds raised through the first Historic Garden Week.

Courtesy of the Garden Club of Virginia

Stratford Hall, birthplace of Robert E. Lee, was the GCV's second restoration.

After listing these epithets in her 1970 book, Follow the Green Arrow: The History of the Garden Club of Virginia, 1920-1970, Christine Hale Martin, herself a member, winds up with this: “Among the more gentle comments was that of an amused gentleman who referred to us as ‘The Senior League of Virginia, where old Junior Leaguers go to die—but don’t.’”

Clearly, even in its early days, this gathering of women who loved gardens and gardening got people’s attention. A loose federation formed in 1920 by eight local clubs statewide, GCV at first had a raison d’etre of preserving Virginia’s natural beauty, especially its roadsides and native plants. This would soon grow—exponentially. In 1924, at the request of the president of the College of William and Mary, the group donated $500 to save a doomed stand of trees near the campus. Soon after, more trees needed saving at Monticello, and they were, thanks to funds raised through a statewide Garden Club of Virginia-sponsored flower show.

The organizers had no idea that they were sowing the seeds of what would become Historic Garden Week, a now-75-year-old tradition that has raised over $13 million dollars toward the restoration of historic gardens around the Commonwealth.

The GCV’s first restoration effort was fitting—a property associated with America’s first president. In the late 1920s, the group learned that Kenmore, home of George Washington’s sister, Betty Washington Lewis, was undergoing restoration. If restoring the house would make history come alive, club leaders wondered, wouldn’t it make sense to restore the grounds as well? The answer was yes—and who better to do it than the GCV? After forming a committee to look into the matter, the club asked the Kenmore Association for the “privilege” of restoring the plantings according to a carefully researched plan created by storied landscape architect Charles H. Gillette. The offer was enthusiastically accepted.

But such an undertaking would require money. After the May 1928 annual GCV meeting, the Kenmore Committee members, the retiring GCV president and the incoming president hatched a plan: Organize a week of house and garden tours of Virginia’s venerable demesnes, and have the owners collect admission at each.