The Petersburg Garden Club is proud to be involved in projects that include maintaining the grounds at Centre Hill Museum, sponsoring students to Nature Camp, Lee Memorial Park restoration and the annual fundraiser for these projects, Splashes of Spring.

Splashes of Spring is the garden clubs annual fundraiser for club projects. The silent auction, luncheon, and speaker is now in its 14th year and always proves to be a day filled with fun and excitement.

Nancy Ross Hugo is a garden writer, lecturer, and landscape consultant who has been gardening in Virginia for over 30 years. For eight years, her "Earth Works" column appeared weekly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and her monthly "Habitat" column on gardening for wildlife appeared in Virginia Wildlife magazine for ten. Nancy's articles on gardening and the outdoors have appeared in Horticulture, Fine Gardening, American Forests, and Country Journal, and she has been recognized for excellence in magazine and newspaper feature writing by the Garden Writers Association of America and by the Urban Forests Council. She was cited for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Horticulture by the Garden Club of Virginia in 1988 and received the Dugdale Award for Conservation in October of 2001. A book of her collected essays, Earth Works, Readings for Backyard Gardeners, was published by the University Press of Virginia in 1997. Most recently, Nancy served as Education Manager at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden where she supervised educational programs for adults and children. Nancy retired from the Garden this fall to return to writing, lecturing, and conducting weekend workshops at Flower Camp in Buckingham County.

At Flower Camp, beginning and experienced arrangers experiment with a wide variety of materials and explore the creative process in an environment where education is enjoyable and learning is unavoidable. "Good food and good fun contribute to good floral design!" says Nancy. Flower Camp also offers classes in botanical art, Japanese brush painting, and other arts that take their inspiration from nature.

Nancy is a graduate of the University of Alabama and has a Master of Science degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has two grown children, six grandchildren, and two gardens-one in Ashland, where she and her husband live, and one in Buckingham, County where she conducts Flower Camp. She attributes her education as a gardener to what she has learned from growing plants both places-often with widely varying results!

Nancy's other major interests include native plants, old books, and old trees, and she is currently at work, with Virginia Tech's Dr. Jeffrey Kirwan and fine art photographer Robert Llewellyn, on a project to document and illustrate remarkable trees of Virginia. The culmination of that project will be a book, Remarkable Trees of Virginia, describing and illustrating 100 of Virginia's finest trees.

In this program, Nancy Ross Hugo describes an approach to flower arranging that takes the fear out of floral design and replaces it with the joy of playing with flowers. She suggests that not every arrangement needs to be a masterpiece for the dining room table-it can be a few stems drooped into a vanilla bottle on the kitchen windowsill. Nancy argues that arrangers can learn as much about color, texture, and form by experimenting with a few flowers, twigs and leaves in a simple vase as they can from creating elaborate centerpieces. She suggests no-fail vases that can make the process easier and no-fail materials that backyard gardeners can grow. "The trick," says Nancy, "is keep the joy in the process, because you see more when you're having fun, and the best arrangements 'flow' from good observation." To this lecture, Nancy brings over 30 years of experience as a gardener and flower arranger as well as the experience of teaching floral design to expert and novice arrangers at Flower Camp, a retreat center on the James, where she and other instructors explore the creative process through floral design and other art forms that take their inspiration from nature.

The Petersburg Garden Club is a 501 c 3 organization

Centre Hill Mansion has been called a "symbol of the grandeur that characterized the aristocracy of Virginia in the nineteenth century." Completed in 1823 this magnificent house was built in the Federal style by Robert Bolling IV and occupied for 80 years by wealthy and powerful members of Virginia's gentry class. The Garden Club of Virginia restored the grounds with proceeds from Historic Garden Week in Virginia. The Petersburg Garden Club continues to maintain the grounds with volunteer help of garden club members.

Nature Camp is teaching young people basic concepts about their environment and the interrelationships between living things and the environment. The purpose of the camp is to create a corps of interested and knowledgeable young citizens who will continue to fight to make our world a better place in which to live.

The Petersburg Garden Club is proud to sponsor a student (s) to Nature Camp.

For an application please contact:
Nature Camp 207 Second Avenue, Farmville, Virginia 23901-1803
To apply for sponsorship contact:
The Petersburg Garden Club Post Office Box 1263, Petersburg, Virginia 23804
Attention, Mrs. Carl. C. Guthrie (Bettie)

The work by members of The Petersburg Garden Club to conserve Lee Memorial Park began over eleven years ago when the herbarium and watercolor collection owned by the garden club was rediscovered. The collection had been sleeping in the city library since the 1940's and was all but forgotten by garden club members. In 1935 Federal and State funding through a New Deal program established by President Franklin Roosevelt, known as the Works Progress Administration, of the Women's and Professional Division provided work for single female heads of households. Lee Park is the only known women's conservation project accomplished by the W.P.A., thereby making it of national significance. In December 1935, the City was designated to build a wildflower and bird sanctuary within the park to provide income for women. Donald Holden, a member of the Petersburg Garden Club was an avid gardener and horticulturist was chosen for supervisor for the job. Groups of unemployed African American and white women working together began the laborious task of clearing the ravines, building over ten miles of paths, planting over one million roots of honeysuckle for erosion purposes, including eight thousand trees, and thirty seven thousand shrubs, constructed bridges and benches.

During the same time herbarium efforts were proceeding at the park by the WPA, a local artist, Bessie Niemeyer Marshall was commissioned by the garden club to illustrate the herbarium collection (over 300 dried specimens collected from the park). The garden club owns 238 watercolors by Marshall and the collection has been published in a botanical book With Paintbrush and Shovel Preserving Virginia's Wildflowers, University Press of Virginia, in association with The Petersburg Garden Club, now in its second printing.

The garden club members realized the park is a unique cultural landscape and remains today as one of the few lasting, physical reminders of the WPA program developed mainly by African Americans.

A new dimension to add to an already diverse landscape is the Eastover Formation. At the central part of the Lieutenant Run exposure, two different rock units are exposed. The lower one, a fine shelly sand termed the Eastover Formation, was deposited in late Miocene time between about 6.5 million and 9.0 million years ago. This marine deposit has numerous fossils of over 200 different species.

The garden club and the City are working collaboratively to develop a Management Plan for the park. The City and garden club are committed to the adoption of the Plan by July 2003.

Lee Memorial Park is a unique botanical habitat of some rare and endangered species, with a beautiful eighteen-acre lake surrounded by more than 300 acres of green space within the city limits of Petersburg. It is a dream come true for the garden club and others that share the vision of reopening Lee Memorial Park to be shared by all citizens of Petersburg and anyone interested in environmental education, and passive recreation in a setting of protected natural habitats.

The Petersburg Garden Club is a 501 c 3 organization.