The Garden Conservancy Releases Trailer for Upcoming Anne Spencer House & Garden Documentary

Edankraal, the garden cottage of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, at her home in Lynchburg, VA.

The Garden Conservancy has announced the release of a new film trailer that highlights its forthcoming documentary film about the Anne Spencer House & Garden in Lynchburg, VA. The trailer can be found on the Garden Conservancy website. The completed documentary will be released later this year.

The upcoming documentary chronicles the site as it evolves from a home and gathering place to a nationally significant cultural landscape that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register. Spencer was a Harlem Renaissance poet, teacher, librarian, and civil rights advocate that helped establish the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP. Her home and garden were a gathering place for luminaries like Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The garden still has a sculpture gifted to Spencer by W.E.B. DuBois that sits on the edge of the pond.

“Anne Spencer’s garden was a place of peace and sanctuary, where she was creative and fostered community. It was a retreat from the pain of segregation in the Jim Crow South,” said Pamela Governale, Director of Preservation at the Garden Conservancy. “It is rare for a historic house and garden to survive. It is especially rare for the house and garden of an African American to survive. This cultural landscape provides a meaningful opportunity to learn about the history of America at an important and pivotal time. With this documentary, we aspire to honor and further preserve the remarkable legacy of Anne Spencer and her home and garden.”

Spencer was known to lose herself in her writing, sometimes working into the early hours of the morning in her one-room garden cottage on the site named Edankraal built by her husband, Edward. Edankraal is a combination of their names followed by “kraal,” the Afrikaans word for enclosure or corral. Ever deep in creative thought, Spencer penned poetry on the back of seed packets and catalogs, scraps of paper, and even her husband’s business ledgers! 

The Conservancy's documentation of the garden includes interviews with notable figures including Brent Leggs, Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and Senior Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and Peggy Cornett, Curator of Plants at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

The documentary is made possible by the Suzanne and Frederic Rheinstein Garden Documentation Program. Founded in 2018, the program seeks to broaden our understanding of gardens as a cultural legacy and capture the essence of something that is largely experiential — the beauty, history, and stories inherent to a garden. It does so by going beyond just preserving a garden’s physical features and forever capturing the garden at a specific moment in time. We employ a multi-pronged approach that expands the preservation narrative to include a garden’s intangible heritage and sense of place.

The Conservancy’s documentation program weaves the history and spirit of a garden together through film, photography, interviews, archives of original materials, and secondary sources to create a multidimensional portrait of a garden as a living work of art, and in many cases, a historic and cultural resource. The story of each garden is put into historical context with information about the property, significant events and changes, and the life and legacy of the garden’s creators.

This program infuses dynamism into the traditional documentation process to enhance understanding and appreciation for unique historic gardens and brings these places to audiences regardless of their location.

The Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, standing at far left, in her garden in Lynchburg, Va., with friends. Her husband, Edward, is kneeling, at left.

The Anne Spencer House & Garden trailer can be viewed at this link.