Southern Garden History Society members have visited the Afton Villa gardens during two annual meetings. The first occasion came during the 1991 gathering in St. Francisville and the second during a 2011 Sunday tour organized by Baton Rouge meeting planners. In both cases our groups had the good fortune to be led by the redoubtable Genevieve Munson Trimble, who with her husband Morrell purchased the ruins site in 1972 and set about restoration of the gardens.
Dating to 1849, the large Afton Villa home, with its expansive gardens, was the West Feliciana Parish home of David and Susan Woolfolk Barrow, natives of North Carolina and Kentucky respectively. Their plantation lands included acreage on both sides of the Mississippi where enslaved laborers produced crops of cotton and sugarcane that generated sufficient profits to build a family seat at the forefront of antebellum fashion. Various sources give credit to the well-travelled and widely-read Susan for favoring a new house built in the vogueish Gothic Revival manner, a fashion much touted by famed architect and horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing. As noted by Suzanne Turner in The Gardens of Louisiana, Downing’s “romantic naturalism” also extended across much of Afton Villa’s designed landscape.
As various sources underscore, the site’s topography was key to David and Susan Barrow’s garden layout. While a curving live oak-lined entry drive and the house were set on comparatively level ground, much of the landscaped area encompassed ground sloping south to Bayou Sara. This terrain feature thus allowed creation of a series of terraces culminating in a ravine, all being enhanced through the addition of walls and steps, with further interest provided by urns, statuary, and widely varying plants.
Afton Villa gardens, however, joined other large-scale, high-maintenance southern sites in reaching an antebellum acme and then going into post-Civil War decline. Still, various elements and features would survive well into the twentieth century, these being carefully recorded in 1952 by Louisiana landscape architect Theodore Landry. (Landry and his landscape architect wife, Lou Bird Landry, played a major role in plantation garden restoration during the mid-century years.) Suzanne Turner notes that in the process he discovered “scant remains of a rose garden, a maze, and a geometric parterre with three large magnolia fuscatas.” Landry’s employers were Afton Villa owners Dorothy Mills Noble Percy and West Feliciana native Wallace Percy. According to his obituary, the couple’s “chief interest” was developing Afton Villa as a “tourist attraction.” Sadly, Wallace Percy died at age fifty on March 11, 1963, this coming only one week after Afton Villa and its collections had burned.
The stage was thereby set for the Trimbles, who nine years later bought the property to stave off subdivision and began installing the gardens there today. In a 2023 Magnolia remembrance of Genevieve Trimble, Randy Harelson recalled her saying “LSU landscape architecture student, Steve Coenen, did a study and garden concept in the 70s that greatly influenced her decision to leave the ruins and make the garden directly inside the remains of the house.”* As well, during a visit to England the Trimbles found inspiration in the ruins garden at Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst. Perhaps most importantly, however, they also wisely drew on the talents of Louisiana State University professor, author, and landscape architect Neil Odenwald for steady long-term direction and oversight.
As thus influenced and inspired, the gardens seen today present a series of rooms gathered around Afton Villa’s surviving bits and stretching over the areas beyond. The property’s website offers a virtual walking tour leading one first through the two-level ruins garden, followed by a boxwood parterre and maze laid out in a pattern initially installed by the Barrows. Next, guests discover the remaining elements of the pre-Civil War terraces, restoration having begun here in the early-twentieth century by Afton Villa’s owners of the period, Robert and Addie Lewis. To garner more details, the reader is encouraged to follow this ten-stop online tour which appropriately ends at the Barrow family cemetery and to watch the video presentation, which includes drone footage of the site.**
As might be expected, the gardens offer a wide-ranging floral display spanning the seasons. The Magnolia description of our April 1991 Afton Villa visit noted that the “wisteria, phlox and wallflowers cover the rubble of former stairways and walls.”*** Perhaps most notable today, however, is the wide array of daffodils planted in the tens of thousands under the Trimbles’ direction, a vivid reminder of Genevieve’s ever-present daffodil yellow jacket.
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*Coenen went on to a life of landscape design, music, and apparent joie de vivre in New Orleans.
**https://aftonvillagardens.com/
***https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/1991-Spring-Vol.-VII-no.-4.pdf
See also the Cultural Landscape Foundation post: https://www.tclf.org/afton-villa-gardens. Referenced here is garden manager Ivy Jones who over many decades proved to be the steady force that kept the Trimble project on track.
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