Poe’s Love of Gardens Inspires Artists

In honor of the Garden Club of Virginia’s upcoming restoration of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum’s legendary Enchanted Garden, the Poe Museum has invited artists to paint, photograph, and sketch the garden for an upcoming exhibit Painting the Enchanted Garden, which will open on Thursday, May 22 and continue until July 20. While countless artists have illustrated Poe’s melancholy poetry and tales of terror, few have represented Poe’s works celebrating the beauty of landscape gardens, and this will be the first exhibit focusing on the living garden designed in 1921 as a recreation of the gardens described in Poe’s stories and poems. The exhibit will feature new artwork by Brenda Bickerstaff-Stanley, Randall Graham, Linda Hollett-Bazouzi, Julia Lesnichy, Chris Ludke, Jean Miller, Mac Paulett, Mary Pedini, Jamie Phillips, Christaphora Robeers, and Mike Steele.

About the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden

Master of the Macabre. Inventor of the Detective Story. Gardener? Yes, Edgar Allan Poe loved gardens and wrote about them in both poetry and prose. The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia modeled its garden after those Poe described in his works and even went so far as to plant most of the flowers Poe mentions in his works. Many of the bricks in the garden paths and walls were salvaged from the buildings in which Poe lived and worked. This year, the Garden Club of Virginia is restoring the Museum’s 93-year-old Enchanted Garden to its original beauty, and you can witness the transformation.