Poe in Richmond: Garden Club of Virginia Restores the Enchanted Garden at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum

Within a few square blocks, one can see Edgar Allan Poe’s mother’s grave, appreciate a bronze statue of the author, dine at Poe’s Pub, visit Raven Place, take a Segway tour of Poe sites, and join a walking tour led by a Poe himself (as portrayed by a historical interpreter). At the heart of this Poe-centric activity is the Edgar Allan Poe Museum of Richmond, Virginia. From the time of its first incarnation, in 1906 as the Poe Memorial Association, the Poe Museum has sought to preserve, promote, and interpret the remnants of Poe’s Richmond, from the buildings in which Poe lived or worked to the artifacts that document his life and times.

Fig 1.

North end of the Enchanted Garden in 1927 with Poe Shrine constructed using materials salvaged from the Southern Literary Messenger building.

Since the Poe Museum opened its doors in 1922, it has amassed a collection of about three thousand pieces of Poeana which is visited by nearly twenty-five thousand people annually from all fifty states and no fewer than thirty different countries. Its educational programs connect students and lifelong learners around the world with Poe’s life and legacy. As it approaches its centennial, the Museum continues to acquire, study, and preserve the remnants of Poe’s Richmond. The following article is the first installment in a series documenting that mission.

The Garden Club of Virginia is in the process of a multiyear restoration of Virginia’s first monument to Edgar Allan Poe, the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden. Although a garden may seem an unlikely memorial to a writer, public gardens enjoyed considerable popularity in the Richmond of Poe’s youth. In Richmond in By-Gone Days (1856), Samuel Mordecai records that the city of about ten thousand residents frequented no fewer than four public gardens in addition to extensive private gardens like the one owned by Poe’s foster father’s business partner Charles Ellis (ca. 1771–1840) on the block bounded by First, Second, Franklin, and Grace Streets (Mordecai, 93, 149–51). Poe is believed to have frequented the Ellis garden and may have courted his first fiancée, Elmira Royster, within its walls. Their engagement, which she is said to have kept secret from her father, was broken when he intercepted Poe’s letters to her from the University of Virginia.

Throughout his life, Poe maintained a fondness for flowers and gardens, frequently wearing flowers in his buttonhole and planting them around his homes. In his poetry and fiction, Poe mentions twenty-nine different varieties of flowers (Mary Newton Stanard and Lucile Gillespie, “Poe’s Flowers: Flowers and Plants Mentioned in Poe’s Works,” 1). His interest in gardens is also reflected in works like “To [Helen]” (1848) and “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847). In the latter, a character named Ellison, whose name may be a reference to Charles Ellis, believes

the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flowers and the trees, he recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort—or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth—he perceived that he should be employing the best means—laboring to the greatest advantage—in the fulfilment, not only of his own destiny as poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man.

(T. O. Mabbott, 3:1272)

The driving force behind planting the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden was Poe Museum cofounder and historic preservationist Mrs. Annie Boyd Jones (d. 1947). In 1921 her husband, Archer Jones...