The Enchanted Garden at Richmond’s Poe Museum (Photo courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation)
The flowers that Edgar Allan Poe often wore pinned to his lapel were an unlikely adornment for an author who spent his short life writing about murder, mystery and madness. In the same way, a garden would seem an unsuitable monument to a man with a taste for the macabre. Poe, however, had a deep passion for nature and gardens — he mentions 29 different flowers in his poetry and fiction. And so, when the Poe Foundation took up residence in the Old Stone House in Shockoe Bottom in the early 1920s (today’s Poe Museum), the group engaged the firm of Baskervill & Lambert to commemorate Poe’s life and work by creating a small, secluded garden in his honor. It opened to the public in 1922.
Called the Enchanted Garden after a line in Poe’s poem “To Helen,” the garden’s layout is based on imagery from another of his poems, “To One in Paradise.” On the back wall of the space, a bust of the author looks out from its brick shrine over a narrow rectangle of lawn framed by an ivy border, said to have been transplanted from Poe’s mother’s grave at St. John’s Church. Along the garden’s brick wall, four boxwoods have grown to the size of small shade trees.
Structural artifacts from Poe’s early years in Richmond were built into the garden’s original hardscape. Bricks and granite lintels were salvaged from the Southern Literary Messenger building, where Poe’s career in journalism began. Stone benches from the boarding house he called home line the garden’s perimeter. “It’s slightly creepy,” suggests Maeve Jones, executive director of The Poe Museum, “to have aspects of Poe’s life woven into the garden itself. But fitting.”
A 1922 engraving of the Enchanted Garden’s Poe Shrine (Illustration by Barrett Doherty courtesy The Poe Museum)
In 2012, the Poe Foundation sought help from the Garden Club of Virginia to restore the Enchanted Garden. The hope was to incorporate horticultural references from Poe’s writing into the garden’s plantings, just as the structural elements from his early life had been woven into its design. Under the direction of the club and landscape architect Will Rieley of Rieley & Associates, the work was completed in 2022.
GCV made improvements that were both functional and aesthetic. “A ramp and a staircase were added to make the garden accessible from all sides,” Jones explains. Fresh sod was rolled out in place of tired turf, and the beds were refreshed with the begonias, clematis, geraniums, hyacinths, hydrangeas, pansies, roses and tulips.
Plants from Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” were also added to the small beds that border the property’s other buildings. “Everything that was planted aligned with the original vision for the garden,” Jones says. GCV continues to provide guidance and expertise so that the museum can maintain a vibrant garden.
This fall, the museum will reseed the lawns in the Enchanted Garden and replace some of the spent border plantings. “We have a pile of brick from Poe’s home in the Bronx [in New York] that a board member brought back to Richmond to use for repairs and replacement,” Jones says, assuring that Poe’s legacy will continue to live on in the Enchanted Garden.
