HU Professor Launches Grant with Lecture at Norfolk Botanical Gardens

Hampton, VA - Hampton University’s Dr. Anne Pierce, assistant professor of education, was recently awarded a grant of $10,750 from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to support “Cultivating the Intellectual Landscape in Virginia.” This is a new research project to determine the significance of school and community garden activities in an effort to preserve the evidence of African-American garden traditions.

Pierce will publicly launch the project with a lecture at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens (NBG) in Norfolk, Va., on Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. The event is free to NBG members and HU faculty, staff and students. The inaugural lecture will discuss the aesthetic principles communicated through nature study and school gardening and the impact these activities have on communities.

“School gardening projects became the basis for hands-on science education and extended classroom concepts to sustain rural Virginia communities,” says Pierce.

From 1898 to 1948, HU, formerly known as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, had extensive gardens tended by students in both the education and agricultural curricula. The “Cultivating the Intellectual Landscape in Virginia” project will identify and examine local horticultural sites that either currently exist or may have once existed due to efforts made by teachers and/or students of HU of that time. These sites are believed to have been critical to the economic development of rural Virginia.

The goal of this project is to build a database that will house images, artifacts and information for future exhibition and publication highlighting these horticultural sites. Continuing through Feb. 2006, the project will conclude with a forum for the discussion of the research findings.

Other scholars participating in the project include Dr. Grey Gundaker, director of graduate studies in anthropology at the College of William & Mary, Mary Lou Hultgren, director of the HU Museum and Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, curator of history and director of membership and community programs at the HU Museum. The Archives of American Gardens (AAG), managed by the Horticultural Services Division of the Smithsonian Institution, will assist the project team in the identification of garden plants and features and in the designing of the database.