A pioneering project of the Garden Club of Virginia, Historic Garden Week is a large house tour that runs for a week each April across the Commonwealth of Virginia. In its 78th year, the 2011 tour is of Virginia's most historic houses, as well as a sampling of other notable private residences. It is run from offices at the Kent-Valentine House on Franklin Street in downtown Richmond, Virginia.
In Virginia, the house pilgrimage or house tour is a regular feature of social life. Historic Garden Week is notable among the tours because it runs across the state, and includes not only old plantations, but houses of notable Virginians with newer wealth. In addition, it is one of the few times many notable private residences are open to the public. Operated by volunteers with a small headquarters staff, Historic Garden Week was created not only to show off houses and gardens, but also to fund the restoration of historic gardens lost to neglect.
Read more about Historic Garden Week: Garden Restorations, About The Tour, Links
Famous quotes containing the words historic, garden and/or week:
“We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in “the social” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)