The Garden City

From Maymont to Lewis Ginter, Richmond's historic gardens serve as time capsules to the past.

From Shockoe Bottom to Lakeside, Richmond is home to several historic gardens; those that aren’t only a horticulturist’s dream, but a historian’s as well. Often featuring obscure backstories, their intriguing secrets might have been lost to time had restorations not helped save them.

One such jewel is Maymont’s Japanese garden. Completed around 1912, the landscape was created by Yonehachi Muto, a master Japanese gardener who designed many of the East Coast’s iconic Japanese gardens. He transformed the former quarry site into a stunning garden haven.

James and Sallie Dooley’s (Maymont’s original owners) desire for a Japanese garden was likely due to a spreading fascination for Japan at the time.

“Japan had opened up to the world in the 1850s and the subsequent world fairs had Japanese gardens and exhibitions at them,” says Kathy Garrett-Cox, its curator and director of historical resources. “People in Western cultures were excited by this culture closed for so long.”

Maymont’s Japanese garden. Photo by Scott Elmquist

While the garden now is about six acres, the initial scope was significantly smaller. “The original was one acre, just a foot of the waterfall area to the Japanese maple,” she says. “It was a much smaller footprint than we think of today.”

After falling into disrepair over the years, Barry Starke of Earth Design, Inc., along with some funding from the Ikebana of Richmond, renovated the space in 1978 expanding it to include the pond which was previously a park-like setting where James Dooley enjoyed fishing. The expansion also pushed the Japanese garden into former areas of the Italian garden, hence the seemingly out-of-place grotto.

While new elements were added, many of Muto’s touches in the original area remain, like a Japanese maple, conifers, bamboo, ferns, lanterns and some pathway stones.

The renovation was officially completed in 1981 becoming the largest public Japanese garden on the East Coast.

“The blending of the two makes it unique,” says Garrett-Cox. “We have the original 1912 footprint and the expansion. Not many gardens have that renovation story.”

The Maymont Japanese Garden shown in 1925. Photo courtesy of Maymont.

A short distance away in the downtown district lies the Valentine Museum’s garden.

Built in the early 1800s, the grounds were originally home to lawyer John Wickham. His quaint garden was embellished with perfumed wisteria, double-flowering pomegranates, hydrangeas and multitudes of ornamental tomatoes, referred to by his wife as “love apples”. A Southern magnolia was also planted – a now 217-year-old tree that still towers over the garden wall near 11th Street.

Former Valentine garden layout; courtesy of the Valentine.

The land, which once spanned a city block, shrank after the house was sold in 1854, but even its new owners found ways to keep the garden alive. Over the years, the small space became so lush with floral additions (like ivy from England’s Kenilworth Castle, roses, lilies of the valley and an apple tree) that the land basically disappeared causing Mary Newton Stanard, a Virginia historian at the time, to declare “What dear, old-time shrub or flower may not be found here!”

The Valentine Museum came to occupy the structure in 1898. It soon opened the former Wickham House’s grounds (also once a site of urban enslavement) to all, becoming one of the only city places of its kind at the time to be unsegregated.

But the overgrown garden soon needed attention. Under the care of the James River Garden Club and Arthur Shurcliff, the man responsible for Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape restoration, it was brought back to life in the late ‘40s. Old brick walkways were uncovered alongside fresh plantings of azaleas, dogwoods and hollies.

In the mid-20th century, the city garden became a sought-after stop, highlighted in magazines like Garden Gossip. Decades later, the over 200-year-old garden remains a distinct natural oasis in the midst of modern development.

These two landscapes are just a sampling left to us from Richmond’s past. Countless others have since been reclaimed by nature or razed to become parking lots and buildings – a tragedy the Garden Club of Virginia (GCV) hopes to prevent for those that remain.

The GCV has restored numerous historic public gardens throughout the commonwealth, including a handful in the Richmond area, like the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden, the Executive Mansion Capitol Square and St. John’s Mews.

“Each project has its own challenges and rewards,” says Deneen Brannock, its restoration committee chair. Understanding the historic site is crucial, with extensive research and archeological work sometimes done before an official restoration plan is devised. “We work closely with our sites and landscape architect to develop a plan that respects the history and character of the setting and takes into account maintenance and property use/needs,” she says.

Grace Arents’ garden at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden was also a focus of theirs in 1990.

Grace Arents garden 1918; photo courtesy of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

Originally home to Lewis Ginter’s Lakeside Wheel Club in the late 1800s, Ginter’s niece Grace Arents purchased the abandoned grounds in 1913 eventually converting the former cycling hotspot into a convalescent home for sick city children.

When the home was no longer needed, Arents reinterpreted the land into a farm naming it Bloemendaal (an ancestral Dutch town meaning “valley of flowers”) in the 1920s.

Initially 10 acres, Arents slowly expanded to 72 acres designing a floral wonderland filled with peonies, daylilies, irises, rhododendrons and roses. Horses and cattle even roamed the grounds at one point.

Lewis Ginter Botanical garden, present-day. Photo by Scott Elmquist

After Arents death in 1926, the farm was left to her companion Mary Garland Smith who lived there until her passing in 1968. She ensured that Arents’ desire to convert the grounds into a botanical garden and public park in honor of her uncle was fulfilled.

In 1984, that wish came to fruition with the GCV restoring Arents’ 1920s garden design a few years later. But hints of Arents personal impact remain, like a 1914 decorative sundial and the ginkgo and southern magnolia trees that stand guard in front of her former home.

Restoring old gardens might seem pointless in a fast-paced world often in search of fresh and new, but it’s destinations like these that serve as interactive time capsules to the past.

“These unique properties provide a connection to our shared history and cultural heritage,” says Brannock. “[They] strengthen our relationship with the natural world.”

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