Alexandra Kennon
Afton Villa
One of St. Francisville’s most enchanting attractions during spring, Afton Villa Gardens has recently received a federal grant to hfund the continued preservation of the famed nineteenth century garden.
A competitive Historic Preservation Fund Award will enable a team to conduct a Historic America Landscape Survey (HALS) on the gardens, providing a record of the site in decades to come. Awarded by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service, the federal funds totalling $58,935 will be used to document the site under the direction of Dr. Lake Douglas, professor emeritus in the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture.
Douglas, whose background lies in historic landscapes, and who served as editor for Genevieve Trimble’s Afton Villa: The Birth and Rebirth of a Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Garden (LSU Press, 2016), has spent years researching and publishing on historic gardens in Louisiana. So, when he was approached with the opportunity to participate in the survey, he already possessed an abundance of knowledge about Afton Villa and its history. “I was acquainted with a lot of the work, just because of my interest,” Douglas said.
"You know, the garden there just didn’t happen. It represents a lot of layers of historically important things. I think it tells us a lot about how people responded to the land, and how people were involved with the land.”
—Dr. Lake Douglas
The historic garden, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, is the only element of the Afton Villa estate to have remained intact after the forty-room Gothic Revival mansion burned to the ground in 1963. Trimble and her husband purchased the property in 1972 and spent the next forty years restoring the once-legendary gardens, breathing new life into a formerly derelict landmark. By 2023, the gardens were ranked as the second most beautiful in Louisiana.
[Read this: 5 Historic Gardens to Visit This Spring]
HALS is charged with creating a lasting, permanent record of significant cultural and designed landscapes in the country using interpretive drawings, written histories, and images. A team composed of Douglas and Duplantis Design Group of Baton Rouge began late last fall working on the two components of the project: Douglas on the historical narrative portion, and Duplantis on the technical drawings section.
“I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to get this property a little more substantially documented for the record, for future generations, so all of the information is in one place,” Douglas said.
The twelve-month project, when complete, will reside in the Library of Congress. Douglas sees the survey as a reckoning of relevance, noting people often take landscapes for granted and fail to understand the transformative process that created a certain site.
“The evolution of landscapes is an important thing for people to know about. You know, the garden there just didn’t happen. It represents a lot of layers of historically important things,” Douglas said. “I think it tells us a lot about how people responded to the land, and how people were involved with the land.”
Afton Villa’s Spring Season begins March 1 and lasts through June 30. Learn more about the gardens at aftonvillagardens.com.
