Buy Now

I visited the Norfolk Botanical Garden for the first time a couple of weeks ago, part of the schedule for “VIP” invitees to the PlantPop Film festival.  I’ve seen my share of public gardens, but never one with a canal running through it. (And I’m told it’s the only one in the U.S.)

And boy do I LOVE this – boat tours through the garden! Though not in November when I visited.  I might just go back in-season to catch a photo like one (found on the NBG Facebook page.)

There are still more water features, like this bog garden.

Adult Education Director Alex Cantwell told us all about these carnivorous plants, which she declares is her favorite plant group. It’s a favorite with kid visitors, too.

I stopped to admire this Magnolia grandiflora, some 40 to 50 feet tall and wide.

Honoring its WPA Workers

After my visit I browsed the garden’s website and discovered what’s most intriguing to me about the garden – that it’s a project of the New Deal, having been started with a $76,278 grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Since most of the male labor force was at work with other projects for the city, a group of more than 200 African American women and 20 men were assigned to the Azalea Garden project.

Laboring from dawn until dusk, the workers cleared dense vegetation and carried the equivalent of 150 truckloads of dirt by hand to build a levee for the surrounding lake. For a period of four years, the 220 original workers continued the back-breaking task of clearing trees, pulling roots and removing stumps. They worked in harsh conditions, long hours during all four seasons, regardless of the blistering heat, humidity, rain, finger-numbing cold, snow or frigid temperatures. They battled snakes, mosquitoes, ticks, and poison ivy. In less than a year, a section of the trees, briers, vines and underbrush had been cleared and readied for planting, using only pickaxes, hoes, shovels, and wheelbarrows. By March 1939, the work had progressed so that 4,000 azaleas, 2,000 rhododendrons, several thousand camellias, other shrubs and 100 bushels of daffodils had been planted. The men and women turned overgrown, swampy acres into a garden that stylistically expressed the national trend of landscape architecture during the late 1930’s. Neither the work nor the pay was great, but it was a means of putting food on the table, which would not have been possible otherwise.

Jobs were scarce, and these workers were paid 75 cents a day.  However, segregation was firmly in place and African-Americans weren’t allowed to visit the garden until decades later.

The good news is that in 2008, the garden began to celebrate these workers with yearly WPA Garden Heritage events held in the azalea-filled area now called the WPA Memorial Garden, with this beautiful statue as its focal point.

I was equally delighted to learn how this recognition of WPA workers came to be.

Thanks to Problem-Solving Middle-Schoolers!

In 2003 a group of middle school students who’d formed a Future Problem Solvers of America Club came to the garden with the idea of uncovering the story of the garden’s original workers.  So they advertised locally to find out if any of them were still living and did find one original gardener at that time, in 2004. She was 80 years old and had not been back to the garden since she left in 1942.

Many of the workers’ descendants attended the first WPA celebration, with one quoted as saying “Mother is like our momma celebrity now!”

A spokesperson for the garden said, “We want their families and we want our community to know this, that these are the people who allow us to be here today.”

In an email exchange with Les Parks, the garden’s Director of Horticulture, he wrote: “Our origin story is fascinating to me, especially at my age. I was born as Jim Crow was ending, I saw my own school system become desegregated, and I have seen people fight for justice and win. It makes working here that much more special.”  Here’s Les in PlantPop’s very first film.

Sources for historic text and photos: WPA War Memorial on the garden’s website;  video “WPA Original Gardeners;” “Celebrating the WPA Original Gardeners” on the garden’s website; “Garden Heritage Celebration” on the garden’s website and “Breaking Ground with the WPA” on the garden’s website.

In my town, New Deal workers are still unknown

I was particularly struck by the garden’s history and its recognition of the original laborers because my own town (Greenbelt, Md.) and my very home are New Deal projects and similarly, the African American laborers who created it back in the ’30s were not allowed to live here – until the ’60s.

So I visited the Greenbelt Museum with questions and found out that the workers – of either race – who built Greenbelt have never been identified.  But museum staff were excited to hear about the Norfolk Botanical Garden’s history, the brilliant middle school project, and the celebrations honoring the workers and their descendants. They hope to see something similar in the works here – starting with finding an “archival intern.” Or maybe another middle school problem-solvers group?

Photos like these in the Library of Congress archives might be helpful in identifying the workers and their descendants. They’re among the 1,600 or so tagged “Greenbelt” in the library’s collection. More New Deal photos – many by photographers hired by New Deal agencies – can be found at the National Archives.

Norfolk Botanical Garden highlights: the canal running through it, and its New Deal Origins originally appeared on GardenRant on December 1, 2024.

The post Norfolk Botanical Garden highlights: the canal running through it, and its New Deal Origins appeared first on GardenRant.

* This article was originally published here

Buy Now

Powered by Azon AutoSites