Elizabeth Lawrence House & Garden

Born in Marietta, Georgia, Elizabeth and her family moved to 115 Park Avenue in Raleigh in 1916, when Elizabeth was twelve years old, so that she and her sister Anne (1908-1980) could attend St. Mary’s School. She later attended Barnard College in New York City. In 1928-1929, she completed coursework at North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering (now N.C. State University), earning a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture degree in 1932. She continued living at her family’s Raleigh home and began working as a professional landscape designer. She also began writing about gardening. Much of her early writing, including A Southern Garden, focused on the garden that she had cultivated and nurtured for many years at her Raleigh home.

The Depression and the death of her father Samuel Lawrence (1874-1936) left the family in reduced circumstances. In 1947, Elizabeth and her mother Elizabeth “Bessie” Bradenbaugh Lawrence (1876-1964) were forced to give up the family home – where the younger Elizabeth had lived for all but the first twelve years of her life – and the cherished garden to move to Charlotte, following sister Anna and her husband Warren Wade Way, Jr. (1905-2003) to the Queen City. In May 1948, Elizabeth purchased land on Ridgewood Avenue in the Poplar Gables neighborhood, located on the southwest edge of Myers Park. Anna and Warren purchased an adjoining lot. Elizabeth oversaw construction of the late Colonial Revival style house at 348 Ridgewood Avenue, where she and her mother resided until Bessie passed away in 1964 and until Elizabeth left Charlotte in 1984 to live near her niece and namesake Elizabeth Lawrence (Way) Rogers (b. 1945) in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Lawrence House remains largely unchanged since Elizabeth left. The garden dates to 1949-1950, when Elizabeth laid out its paths, beds, and borders around the newly completed residence and began her plantings. The garden survives as the most intact and best-preserved example of the work of the first woman graduate of N.C. State’s landscape architecture program. The garden also served as Elizabeth’s laboratory where she cultivated a wide range of both heirloom plants and modern cultivars, studied their habits, and wrote about the experience in her Charlotte Observer columns from 1957 to 1971 and in The Little Bulbs and Gardens in Winter, as well as in her 1967 revision and reprint of A Southern Garden. The garden fell into decline as Elizabeth grew older, but a multiyear restoration project began in 1986 to restore it to its former beauty. The Wing Haven Foundation, a nonprofit that closely with the Garden Conservancy (a national organization dedicated to preserving and sharing America’s significant gardens), acquired the property in 2008 and manages the site as Elizabeth Lawrence did. The house and garden are open to the public as a horticultural and historic resource.