Black gardeners in the history of Norfolk Botanical Garden

“Breaking Ground,” Kathleen Farrell’s eight-foot sculpture, commemorates the 200 black women and 20 black men who cleared the grounds and planted the Norfolk Botanical Gardens between 1938 and 1942 in a WPA program.  (Photo: courtesy of Norfolk Botanical Gardens. Permission request pending.)

Margaret Gray Bayne

Like many Hampton Roads residents and tourists I visited the Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG) many times and never considered its origins. Using day passes or one of several memberships purchased over the years, I walked the trails, viewed the statuary, marveled at giant azaleas, camellias, and rhododendrons (bearing little resemblance to the struggling specimens in my yard), attended events, wandered through the rose garden, and took boat rides along the canal. I also managed to miss the trails closest to the airport and the plaque near the Japanese garden commemorating the people who dug and cleared the area to start the garden.

Japanese garden at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Photo: Norfolk Botanical Garden; repro permission pending.

Some 20 years after my first visit, “Breaking Ground,” Kathleen Farrell’s eight-foot sculpture of a woman wearing a dress with one foot on a shovel, was unveiled to commemorate the 200 black women and 20 black men who planted the garden’s first installations between 1938 and 1942. 

Azalea Garden, as NBG was formerly known, was among hundreds of museums, swimming pools, playgrounds coliseums, botanical gardens, parks and recreational areas created or improved during the Depression with funding from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). However, what sets NBG apart from other large outdoor projects was that the work was performed mostly by women. And before 2009 people didn’t know this Depression-era story about survival and city planning.

The WPA Norfolk garden work force. Photo: Norfolk Public Library collection.

There are two parts to the story behind the sculpture and how we know about the people who were the first planters at Norfolk Azalea Garden.

The first part begins in 2003 with a middle school group that wanted to volunteer at NBG after Hurricane Isabel and refused to take “No” for an answer. 

The second part continues with Martha McClenny Williams, a former Hampton University professor of education and NBG board member who worked with the students and garden staff. Inspired by the experience and the history, she wrote the book, WPA Original Gardeners, 2017, and a children’s book, First Gardeners, 2023.  

The throughline connecting the students, the two books, and the sculpture is the hidden history of how the group of mostly women cleared 25 acres of swampland and transformed the area into a garden. WPA Original Gardeners also provides many lessons about community engagement and how young people, when given the opportunity and support, can improve community relations and change how we appreciate and celebrate the past.

How the students got involved 

“Black team members said their families never visited the garden while white students said their families visited the garden regularly and participated in annual events.” 

(We’re seeking photo of Ruffner students and photo reproduction permissions.)

The 2003-2004 school year had been in session for two weeks when Hurricane Isabel ripped through Virginia on September 18 as a Category 2 storm. During the storm, ten people were killed; hundreds were injured; homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed. Virginia’s damages were estimated at two billion dollars. Weeks after the storm, millions of people still had no electricity.

When school reopened nearly three weeks later in October, Norfolk, like many communities throughout the state and along the eastern seaboard, was still cleaning up and trying to get back to normal. Young people were eager to participate in clean-up efforts, including the Ruffner Academy Middle School Problem Solving Team, an extracurricular competition for gifted students. 

Each year the team identifies a community problem and tries to solve it. According to WPA Original Gardeners, the group had read articles about the storm and knew about the extensive damage at the NBG. News accounts described how garden administrators were worried that they would not be able to clean up in time for the Christmas light show, the garden’s biggest annual fundraiser.

“The students wanted a problem they could solve and they came to the garden to ask if they could help with the cleanup as a community project,” recalled Martha Williams.

Martha McClenny Williams discussing her book, WPA Original Gardeners, on Tidewater Waves in 2019.

But cleaning up after a major storm is heavy-duty, dangerous work—requiring machinery and caution to remove fallen trees and to repair and safeguard power lines. For the Isabel cleanup, no volunteers under 16 were permitted and no one under 18 was allowed to operate machinery. 

Continuing to brainstorm ways to help out in the garden, students’ discussions led them to questions about the garden’s history and visitorship. Black team members said their families never visited the garden while white students said their families visited the garden regularly and participated in annual events. This dichotomy got students to thinking. Their next question for the board was: “How can we help get more families to visit the garden?”

The students’ question was on point: park and museum boards consider some form of this question all the time, and go through great lengths—focus groups, needs assessments, and long-term strategic and financial planning—to develop new audiences. It is an introspective question that involves reviewing the past and mapping the future.

Partnering with an unlikely group of middle schoolers helped NBG expand the conversation about audience development, and gave the board what Tim Deakins, a writer for MuseumNext, an online journal for museum professionals, calls “the necessary jumpstart” that set in motion research and community alliances that would illuminate black workers’ foundational development of the garden.

Embarking on an oral history project, the students developed questionnaires and sought the names and family members of the original gardeners.. Their search became a mission and public campaign involving local newspapers, television and radio stations, civic leagues, churches, organizations like the NAACP,  and universities. 

The students discovered workers’ names and interviewed surviving gardeners and family members.  To date, 78 workers have been identified.

Finding survivors or relatives willing to talk about experiences working in the gardenwas not easy. Not surprisingly some family members did not know that grandparents or relatives had worked at the site. Some never talked about it and only a few ever returned to see the results of their labor.

Descendants of the first gardeners at a Norfolk Botanical Garden program commemorating the gardeners in October 2021. (Ecollective photo)

During their interviews, students discovered the hardships families endured throughout the Depression and the hard work that enabled them to survive. For nearly four years, the women had cleared trees, removed stumps, dug trenches and channels, and planted from 7:00-3:30 PM, Monday through Friday. The students’ project won first prize in the International Problem Solving competition. 

Martha McClenny Williams joined the NBG board in 2003 as part of Hampton University’s “To Lead and to Serve” community engagement.  She’d just started on the board when the Ruffner students proposed their project. Following their visits, the board president asked Williams if she would chair a diversity committee made up of community members and garden staff that would help the students with their research.

After the 2003-2004 school ended, the inquiry and investigation continued with the NBG staff and the NBG board explored ways to commemorate the first gardeners.

Williams’ daughter, an author, pointed out that she had collected enough information to write a book. WPA Original Gardeners contextualizes the oral histories by providing a brief history of Norfolk during the Great Depression and its impact on the city’s African American community and workers, who like the city “went from striving to struggling.”

The Norfolk city manager envisioned an azalea garden next to the airport as a way of increasing revenue. The Norfolk Municipal airport was built between 1938-1940. (Ecollective graphic)

Central to the story is how Norfolk’s city manager got the idea for an azalea garden while visiting his hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. He envisioned a similar project for Norfolk next to the city’s airport. His thinking was that an azalea garden next to the airport would make the area more attractive and make money. 

 However, as Williams points out, the city manager’s vision didn’t acknowledge that the area next to the airport was a sit “unfit for cultivation.” Nevertheless, the city secured an initial WPA grant for $76, 278 and was later awarded an additional $138, 553 for the project.

Cutting costs on the backs of black women

Even with more funding, the Azalea Garden project was still a big job with a little budget, but city officials believed the garden could be developed if costs were kept low. The cost-cutting solutions were to hire women at a lower hourly wage instead of men and to have workers perform the work using hand tools: shovels, hoes, ropes andwheelbarrows, instead of tractors or other earth moving equipment.

At the time not everyone was happy about the city manager’s solutions. Concerns and protests were raised, but the women persisted: they needed the work to feed children and other family members. There’s a old saying, “When the nation gets a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” In this instance, when the nation got a depression, black women in Norfolk bore the brunt.

The heavy labor the women performed on swampy land “unfit for cultivation” was inconsistent with how other WPA projects employed women. Usually, men were hired for strenous outdoor work and building projects. Women were given jobs doing inside work or lighter gardening chores.

View of “Breaking Ground” sculpture. (Photo: Norfolk Botanical Garden)

The NBG story Martha Williams tells in both books and the Breaking Ground sculpture place the women workers front and center.  

 This bit of local history about Virginia’s largest botanical garden takes the opposite view of typical city planning history that awards credit to an important figure or official. 

As Paul Gilbert, executive director of Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, wrote on a park association website, “Inclusive history helps everyone see the many people and groups who have walked these lands before us and put current events into a fresh perspective.”

Margaret Gray Bayne is a member of the Ecollective editorial board and a contributing writer.