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I went to Norfolk Botanical Garden expecting flowers. That’s a reasonable expectation when you visit a place with more than 60 themed gardens spread across a sprawling property. I expected to admire the landscaping, take far too many photographs and probably come home knowing the names of several plants I would immediately convince myself I could grow in Wisconsin.
Instead, the story I carried home was about 200 Black women.
In 1938, during the Great Depression, those women—along with 20 Black men—were hired through the Works Progress Administration to turn wetlands and dense, difficult terrain into what was envisioned as an azalea garden for the City of Norfolk. They cleared trees and underbrush with hand tools, battled snakes, mosquitoes, ticks and poison ivy, and moved the equivalent of 150 truckloads of dirt by hand, using wheelbarrows to help construct a levee. Within months, thousands of azaleas, rhododendrons, shrubs, trees and daffodils were going into the ground.
They were paid 25 cents an hour. (White women were being paid 31 cents an hour for work in the program, and it was mostly administrative) And after helping create this beautiful public space for Norfolk, segregation meant the very people who built it couldn’t come back and enjoy it as guests. The Jim Crow era was still in full swing.
That stopped me cold.
Before There Was a Garden, There Was a Swamp
The original idea for the garden belonged to Norfolk City Manager Thomas P. Thompson and horticulturist Frederic Heutte. Heutte believed Norfolk’s climate could support an azalea garden capable of competing with the famous gardens drawing tourists to Charleston, South Carolina. It was a smart tourism idea: create something beautiful, bring people to Norfolk and give the city an attraction that could continue growing over time.
In June 1938, the WPA awarded $76,278 to begin the Azalea Garden project. There was one significant problem. Someone had to turn the proposed site into a garden, and most of the available male WPA workforce had already been assigned to other city projects. The workforce sent to the Azalea Garden was therefore unusual for a major public-works project: approximately 200 African American women and 20 African American men.
Calling them “gardeners,” though, almost makes the beginning sound too gentle. These women weren’t showing up with little trowels to deadhead roses and arrange flower beds.
They were clearing wetlands.
These Women Did Brutal Physical Labor
The first phase required removing stumps, uprooting vegetation, clearing underbrush and moving earth by wheelbarrow across the first 25 acres. They worked with pickaxes, hoes, shovels and rakes while dealing with mosquitoes, ticks, poison ivy, poison oak, sumac and snakes. They did this through Virginia’s summer heat and winter cold.
One of the original workers, Mary Elizabeth Ferguson, later remembered being told to pick up a pickaxe and rake even though she barely weighed 110 pounds. She also remembered that the women were doing most of the planting. Her reason for taking the job wasn’t romantic or inspirational. She had children. She needed to survive.
I think that’s an important distinction because it’s tempting, looking backward, to turn these women into inspirational figures who nobly volunteered to create something beautiful for future generations. They were workers who needed jobs during the Great Depression, and they deserved to be paid fairly and treated with dignity for the work they performed.
The Garden’s history records their wage at 25 cents an hour. That’s a detail I wish received even more interpretation on site, because numbers without context can become strangely harmless. Twenty-five cents sounds quaint until you begin asking harder questions about how public-works jobs were classified, who received the better-paying assignments, and how race and gender affected the economic opportunities available to Black women in 1938.
That’s part of this history too.
Imagine Building It—and Being Told It Wasn’t for You
By March 1939, the workers had helped plant 4,000 azaleas, 2,000 rhododendrons, thousands of other shrubs and trees, and 100 bushels of daffodils. Their labor was transforming difficult terrain into a public garden that would eventually become one of Norfolk’s great attractions.
Then segregation did what segregation did.
Norfolk Botanical Garden now explicitly acknowledges that the public segregation policies of the era prevented these workers from visiting the Garden as guests. Its current scholarship materials state it even more plainly: the Original Gardeners created a city garden they themselves would not have access to.
Think about what that actually meant. Their hands cleared the land and planted the flowers. Their backs moved the dirt. They created the paths and went home exhausted with 25 cents for every hour they had worked. Then other people could stroll through the beautiful place they had created because it belonged to the city, while the Black women responsible for much of that beauty could not enjoy it on equal terms.
That’s not a footnote to the story of Norfolk Botanical Garden.
That is part of the story of how Norfolk Botanical Garden was built.
For Years, Their Names Weren’t the Story
There’s another piece that bothered me. For decades, the origin story centered largely on the men with the vision for the garden rather than the women whose physical labor turned that vision into reality.
Thompson and Heutte absolutely belong in the history. One conceived the project and the other brought the horticultural knowledge needed to make it successful. But ideas don’t move 150 truckloads’ worth of dirt by wheelbarrow.
People do.
Historian Dr. Martha McClenny Williams has played an important role in recovering the story of the Original Gardeners. Research into the Garden’s past helped bring renewed attention to the 200 Black women and 20 Black men who performed that labor, and descendants have continued helping identify workers whose names had largely disappeared from the historical record.
That’s particularly painful to me because these weren’t anonymous “WPA workers.” They were women with names, families, bills to pay and children to feed. They had sore backs when they went home. They had lives that continued after their shifts ended.
They deserve to be remembered as people.
Norfolk Botanical Garden Is Trying to Correct the Record
This is where I want to give Norfolk Botanical Garden credit, because the Garden isn’t hiding this history.
Today, the WPA Memorial Garden honors the Original Gardeners. Kathleen Farrell’s larger-than-life bronze sculpture Breaking Ground depicts the workers and was created using historic photographs and a Black female model. An excerpt from The Garden, a poem written by Gracie Anthony, whose mother Josephine Hopkins was one of the Original Gardeners, appears at its base.
There’s also Garden Club – WPA, a life-size painting by Norfolk artist Maizelle honoring the workers, and the Garden continues trying to identify the Original Gardeners and connect with their descendants. Recognition isn’t limited to monuments, either. The Garden holds a WPA Heritage Celebration, presents a Groundbreaker Award inspired by Breaking Ground, and has established a scholarship for underrepresented students pursuing education connected to green industries.
Those are meaningful steps, and I appreciate seeing an institution make an effort to bring people who were pushed to the margins of its own history back into the center of the story.
I still think there’s room to go further.
Honoring Them Means Telling the Uncomfortable Parts Too
I don’t want to visit a memorial and leave only thinking, Wasn’t it wonderful what these women accomplished? It was extraordinary, but their achievement becomes even more extraordinary when we understand what they were up against.
I want to know more about those 25-cent wages. I want the interpretation to explain how WPA jobs were classified, who received the better-paying assignments and what 25 cents an hour meant compared with other public-works jobs in Norfolk. I want to understand why 200 Black women ended up doing backbreaking land-clearing work in the first place and how their opportunities differed from those available to white women, Black men and white men.
And I absolutely want visitors to understand that after these women helped create something specifically intended to beautify Norfolk and attract people to the city, racial segregation meant they couldn’t enjoy it on the same terms as the people they had built it for.
A bronze statue is important, but context is powerful.
I want both.
The Flowers Look Different Once You Know
Knowing this history changed the way I looked at the Garden. An azalea wasn’t simply an azalea anymore because I started thinking about the hands that put the first ones into the ground. When I looked across the landscaped acreage, I thought about what had been there before: dense vegetation, wetlands, stumps, snakes, mosquitoes and mud.
Then I pictured women with pickaxes.
These women didn’t inherit a beautiful garden and maintain it. They made one. The Garden visitors enjoy today has grown enormously from those first acres, but its roots—literally and figuratively—reach back to the labor of people who weren’t treated as equals by the community benefiting from their work.
That’s a story every visitor should know.
This Is the Kind of History I Want Destinations to Tell
I don’t expect the modern Norfolk Botanical Garden to answer for decisions made under Jim Crow nearly ninety years ago. I do expect historic destinations to tell us what happened, particularly when uncomfortable history is directly connected to the attraction we’re enjoying today.
Norfolk Botanical Garden is doing more of that than many places I’ve visited. It acknowledges segregation openly, honors the Original Gardeners through art and programming, continues searching for their identities and has connected their legacy to opportunities for a new generation. That’s worth recognizing.
But historical interpretation should keep evolving as we learn more. I’d love to see the economic story explored more deeply, particularly the wages and WPA job classifications. Not because doing so diminishes the beauty of Norfolk Botanical Garden, but because it explains what some of that beauty cost the people who created it.
The flowers are lovely.
The truth makes them matter.
I Went to See a Garden. I Left Thinking About 200 Women.
That’s what I remember most from Norfolk Botanical Garden. Not one particular flower or the prettiest photograph I took, but the women whose labor made those early gardens possible.
Two hundred Black women showed up in 1938 and did grueling physical labor to transform difficult land into something beautiful. Alongside 20 Black men, they helped create a garden that generations of people would eventually enjoy. They did it for 25 cents an hour during an era when the color of their skin affected where they could work, where they could go and whether they could fully enjoy the public spaces their own labor helped create.
For too long, they weren’t the names most people associated with the founding of Norfolk Botanical Garden. Now the Garden is working to change that, and I hope it keeps going.
Because perhaps the best way to honor these women isn’t simply to put their likeness in bronze. It’s to make certain everyone who walks past those azaleas understands whose hands put the first ones into the ground—and what those women endured to do it.
