The 2025 Mount Vernon Symposium: Revolutionary Gardens, Future Visions

Special Tour of Gardens and Landscapes in the Historic Area with Horticulture Staff (separate ticket)

Join Mount Vernon’s Horticulture team for an insider look at the estate’s historic gardens and landscapes. The tour includes the Upper Garden, Lower Garden, Bowling Green, and a discussion of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association’s decades-long viewshed preservation efforts. After the tour, join Horticulture staff for lunch on the Founders’ Terrace at the Library. 

Tickets for this experience are sold separately and are open to those who aren’t attending the Symposium. 

The First Farmer of America and His Garden

Bruce Ragsdale 

After his resignation from the Continental Army, Washington was acclaimed as the First Farmer of America, and he organized his agricultural estate as a kind of cultivated garden that displayed his learning and his careful stewardship of the land. Drawing on his study of British agricultural improvement, Washington crafted the landscape of his farms with an aesthetic vision and an emphasis on public display. Every field at Mount Vernon was to be tended “as well for appearance as profit.”² Washington’s close study of British agricultural literature and his knowledge of the landscape architects who had transformed the British countryside in the eighteenth century guided his plans for the farms at Mount Vernon. The design of his farms revealed a surprisingly cosmopolitan Washington in conversation and exchange with his British contemporaries during the early years of the new nation.

Listening to the Land: Stewardship and Resilience at Moyaon, Ancestral Capital of the Piscataway

Anjela Barnes and Mario Harley

Reflect on the ancestral and ecological legacy of Moyaon—now Piscataway Park—across the Potomac from Mount Vernon, the sacred Land once the capital of the Piscataway people. This vibrant site continues to serve as a place of stewardship, cultural renewal, and ecological preservation. The presentation will provide a historical overview of Moyaon and the Piscataway people, centering on the significance of this place and traditional ways of caring for and stewarding the Land. It will showcase how the Accokeek Foundation collaborates with Indigenous knowledge holders through community-centered approaches and hands-on service-learning to restore the Land and its viewshed in right relations. Attendees will learn how these practices address modern environmental challenges, honor cultural heritage, and foster a deeper connection to place. By integrating traditional ways of knowing with forward-looking strategies, the presentation highlights a path toward sustainable gardening and land stewardship that preserves this sacred landscape for future generations

The Nature of Oaks

Douglas Tallamy, Keynote

The Nature of Oaks highlights the seasonal cycles of the creatures dependent upon oaks. From woodpeckers who collect and store hundreds of acorns for sustenance to the beauty of jewel caterpillars, Tallamy illuminates and celebrates the wonders that occur right in our own yards and restorations. This presentation will inspire you to treasure these trees and to act to nurture and protect them.

An Oak Spring Landscape: Stewarding the Legacy of Rachel Lambert Mellon in the 21st Century

Sir Peter Crane FRS

The Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia (osgf.org) is dedicated to inspiring and facilitating scholarship and public dialogue on the history and future of plants, including the culture of gardens and landscapes, and the importance of plants for human well-being. Located on the former estate of Rachel Lambert Mellon, the foundation has a responsibility to perpetuate and share the exquisite garden created by Mrs. Mellon, the beautiful and tranquil landscape in which it is embedded, and her exceptional library focused on the history of plant science, plant exploration, and the development of gardens and landscape design. The lecture will outline the challenges and opportunities inherent in managing the garden and more 700 acres of the Virginia Piedmont in an era of climate change and a rapidly changing regional context.

Pen-and-Ink Apps: The Almanac as Garden Tool

Joyce E. Chaplin

No garden (except maybe the Garden of Eden) is unchanging. Gardeners must keep track of change over time. Now, there’s an app for that—and there was a ye olde app for that in early America: the almanac. By the early nineteenth century, printers made thousands of these paper tools available at low prices. As with any successful technology, these tools did what consumers wanted, but also pushed them to do the unexpected. 

R-Evolution in the Garden; Repairing and Preparing Land for Unknown Futures

Thomas Woltz

To cultivate judiciously is to prepare and develop the garden while envisioning a particular future with intent and wisdom. This is synonymous with the act of design. To cultivate a garden for revolution is, by extension, to design the ground for dramatic transformations to come, that is to say, evolution. To prepare land in the 21st century for revolution means to enhance its biodiversity, to become resilient in the face of climate extremes, and to rebuild lost or broken bonds between people and nature. The designed gardens of the future can do all these things; however, vigilance is required that amidst the urgent preparations for revolution/evolution, that we do not lose or further erase the cultural stories the land holds for us to understand our past in ways that build a better future. Thomas Woltz will present a series of forward-looking landscape designs that are the result of the firm’s research-driven process grounded in archaeology, historic research, and ecological analysis, to anchor designed landscapes firmly to their authentic site and individual histories. As we prepare for the unknowns ahead, for whatever revolutions may come, we risk losing sight of the essential value in building on the continuum of cultural history that lies within all land. Each of the future-facing designed landscapes that Woltz will present demonstrates how a research-driven design process builds landscapes that prepare for the unknown while amplifying and preserving the layered history of the land, acknowledging that every garden has a story to tell. 

Movement and Belonging: Placing the Garden in a Changing Climate 

Emily Pawley  

Gardens that look homelike to us now were the products of rapid change and massive species movement in Early America—farmers and gardeners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries assembled the plants of modern gardening from across the globe and continually questioned what belonged where. These were difficult questions to answer, both because they were moving novel organisms to new conditions and because the climate was changing, both with the last ebbing away of the Little Ice Age and from the drastic alterations to local microclimates that came from deforestation and cultivation.  Nevertheless, improving gardeners were convinced that particular new plants belonged in particular places,  just as new people did, and they worked to prove it. In this talk, we’ll think through these processes of movement and the creation of belonging, and use them to reflect on current efforts at assisted plant migration as the climate shifts again. 

Wave Hill at 60: Learning from Our Past to Reimagine Our Future

Ray B. Oladapo-Johnson

The future of historic gardens extends beyond preservation. In the face of climate change, these spaces must continue to evolve and serve as resilient ecosystems and hubs for environmental education, ensuring accessibility and equity for all. Oladapo-Johnson blends lessons from Wave Hill, celebrating its 60th anniversary as a public garden and cultural center in New York City, with his vision for the future to strengthen community ties, deepen our connection to nature, and inspire future generations.

A Jamaican Garden in Ireland: Women, Botany, and Archival Fragments in the Early Atlantic World

Kate Mulry

This talk examines the collection, transportation, and transplantation of nearly a thousand plant specimens from Jamaica to a garden in Ireland in the 1690s. It will reveal the role of enslaved plant collectors in Jamaica, the sailors who cared for the fragile specimens on the lengthy sea voyage, and the cadre of skilled gardeners who replanted the specimens in the earliest Irish greenhouses. Finally, it will highlight the women who cared for the transplanted garden for decades after their brother, celebrated as the “father of Irish gardening,” had died. While there is no single library or archive that carries records about the creation of this massive garden of Caribbean plants, many scattered records exist. These snippets of texts, classified as “family papers,” for instance, comprise an overlooked archive of early modern science and emphasize the contributions and labor of people often marginalized and overlooked in histories of early modern botany.

Living in a Liberated Landscape

Larry Weaner

All too often in our gardens and landscapes we think of static compositions of carefully placed and managed plants. But our approach can be more dynamic—and arguably more rewarding—than that by taking advantage of plants’ natural abilities to reproduce and proliferate. Learn how designer Larry Weaner combines design with the reproductive abilities of plants as well as ecological processes to create compelling, ever-evolving landscapes that bring new meaning to partnering with nature. Using examples from his own property as well as diverse client projects, Larry will share how this give-and-take approach can result in compelling, low-maintenance landscapes that free plants to perform according to their natural abilities and liberate people from having to cater to their landscapes’ every need. 

Black Women in Flux: Woods, Water, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp

Kathryn Benjamin Golden

This talk locates Black women in forests, swamps, and in documentary records – where they have previously evaded our detection and attention. Through their noncompliant, reciprocal, and emancipatory relationships with land, water, woods, and swamps, Black women in the Tidewater mapped insurgency across Virginia and North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. Consorting with the forested swamp’s ecological offerings provided alternative lifeways and insurgent opportunity to nurture personal and community wellness against forced productive labor, reproductive violence, sexual assault, desecrated motherhoods, and pervasive social death outside of the swamp refuge. From their relationships with nature and wilderness, women seized secret and subversive opportunities to rest, and to claim and provide health and nourishment for their own vitality and that of their families and communities. But Tidewater women also conspired with the woods and swamps to make bold escapes as fugitives and maroons, moving in daring strokes of self-possession and autonomy, where it was otherwise forbidden.