Spring has sprung on Grounds and the pavilion gardens surrounding the Lawn are blooming with green life again. Flowering dogwoods hang over the serpentine brick walls that enclose the manicured gardens full of tulips and daffodils, providing a quiet, shady recluse to study or take a quick nap on the freshly cut grass. For students and University visitors, the gardens contribute to the beauty as well as the history of Grounds.
The gardens have been a part of the University since its founding. When Jefferson designed his Academical Village, he hoped that the gardens would be both a place and subject of study, believing the ideal garden combined "pleasure, utility and a place for thought and study," according to the University Gardens website. He wrote that such a landscape design, of gardens intermixed with academic buildings, "would afford the quiet retirement so friendly to study."
"The gardens are such an integral part of the University," second-year College student Emily Smith said while taking advantage of the shade in Pavilion Garden I. "The University revolves around a central part of Grounds where you can meet people, while the gardens are a quiet place where you can have more intimate meetings and find some space."
The garden walls were completed in 1824 and designed by Jefferson, while the gardens themselves were originally left to the maintenance of the pavilion residents, who Jefferson hoped would plant, plan and care for their own garden, Mary Hughes, the University landscape architect, said in an email. Six of the 10 gardens are divided in half by the serpentine walls. Of these gardens, the upper gardens are more formal and appropriate for contemplation, while the lower gardens are called "Hotel Gardens" as they corresponded to the former dining halls on the Range and were more practical in purpose.
In 1948, The Garden Club of Virginia restored the pavilion gardens, Hughes said. Alden Hopkins, then-landscape architect for Colonial Williamsburg, was hired to create a master plan for all 10 gardens based on the design styles and plants available in the early 19th century when the University was first constructed.
"These are not strictly 'restorations' in the current use of the term, since they do not reflect the appearance of the gardens at any one point in their history," Hughes said.
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