LRMA 13th Garden Lecture

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, along with The Laurel Garden Club, will present "Afton Villa: The Birth and Rebirth of a Nineteenth Century Louisiana Garden," it's 13th Garden Lecture in the Sanderson Gallery. Genevieve Musnon Trimble will the the featured speaker.

Trimble's remarkable story of Afton Villa began with a tragedy. In 1963, fire ravaged the 40-room Victorian Gothic Plantation home on the historic estate outside St. Francisville, Louisiana, bringing to ashes over 170 years of history. Over the next decade, its once-regal serpentine entryway and carefully laid out gardens gradually deteriorated, as vines strangled the rows of azaleas that once welcomed guests. A place of enchantment crumbled toward extinction.

Trimble's new book, Afton Villa: The Birth and Rebrith of a Nineteenth Century Louisiana Garden, documents her decades-long restoration project while providing a history of the original owners and paying tribute to the other people who contributed to its rebirth. Focusing on preservation, Trimble reveals how the garden's original footprint survived as well as how she thoughtfully introduced new flora into the terraced landscape, including the foundation ruins of the house, under the guidance of landscape architect Neil G. Odenwald. With steep learning curves and devastating setbacks, including hurricane destruction, each milestone in the recovery of Afton Villa marked a triumph of collaborative will over adversity.