New UGA Press books explore Georgia's garden history

The University of Georgia Press has published big new books on historic Georgia gardens.

The books are large in scope and literally large — a combined 11 pounds and nearly 1,000 10- by 12-inch pages.

One of the books, “Seeking Eden: A Collection of Georgia’s Historic Gardens” by Staci Catron and Mary Ann Eaddy, grew out of the other book.  “Garden History of Georgia 1733-1933,” compiled by Loraine M. Cooney, a founder of Atlanta’s long-running Piedmont Arts Festival, and edited by Hattie C. Rainwater, was originally published in 1933 by Atlanta’s Peachtree Garden Club.

The gardens in those books are also the basis of an exhibition at the Atlanta History Center, up through Dec. 31.

Locally, the authors are scheduled for a lecture and book signing at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia at 6:15 p.m. Tuesday.

“Seeking Eden” has been years in the making, starting about 2002 with a collaboration among the Garden Club of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Historic Preservation Division, the National Park Service and the Cherokee Garden Library, which is part of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

That collaboration, the Georgia Historic Landscape Initiative, had a simple purpose: Find out what became of the more than 160 formal gardens documented in “Garden History of Georgia,” published in conjunction with Georgia’s bicentennial, and how they had changed in the ensuing decades.

In surveys between 2002 and 2016, the researchers found that about one-third of the gardens were gone. Remnants remained of about one-third, but another one-third survived into the 21st century, including several in the Athens area. Beech Haven, inspired by the the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and hidden away off Atlanta Highway, is featured along with several University of Georgia gardens, including the historic North Campus, the garden at the President’s Mansion on Prince Avenue and the Founders Memorial Garden near Park Hall on the UGA campus.

Some of the other featured gardens are the Swan House garden in Atlanta, the squares of Savannah, the Rock City Gardens at Lookout Mountain, Millpond Plantation near Thomasville, Salubrity Hall of Augusta, gardens at Berry College and Ferrell Gardens at the Hills and Dales Estate in LaGrange, considered “one of the best-preserved 19th-century designed landscapes in the southeastern United States,” according to the authors.

All but 10 are public gardens.

Gardening has a long history in Georgia, sparked by the same impulses that push gardeners today.

“The new colonists strove to control nature by carving out a formal system in a world they viewed as wild and untamed,” the "Seeking Eden" authors wrote in their introduction.

"Seeking Eden" doesn’t attempt to be a comprehensive history of Georgia gardens, though its introduction does outline that history, along with the roles played by the Garden Club of Georgia and other clubs in preserving formal gardens and garden history.

The book’s purpose is rather to reveal the looks of and stories behind 30 existing gardens, dating from the 18th to the early 20th century, with images by architectural and landscape photographer James Lockhart.

Lockhart documented more than 1,600 nominations to the National Register of Historic Places with photographs before his retirement from the state Historic Preservation Division.

But the stories of the gardens are infused with family, local and state histories, along with histories of the gardens themselves and of changing gardening styles and approaches.