A labor of love, Afton Villa’s garden

In “Afton Villa: The Birth and Rebirth of a Nineteenth Century Villa,” Genevieve Trimble details the struggles, sweat, setbacks, and love in reviving the acres of formal gardens surrounding a grand home lost to fire in St. Francisville, Louisiana.

“All old gardens are haunted, one quickly discovers, in that their former owners who have loved and tended them seem forever in the shadows, possessively prescribing and dictating what not to tamper with or change,” writes Trimble.

Afton Villa was constructed between 1849 and 1858 by David and Susan Barrow. The forty room castle was built over and incorporated the earlier 1790 family homestead. It was among the largest antebellum houses of its time and a notable example of Victorian Gothic architecture. “Even more spectacular were the gardens surrounding the house: twenty-five acres of flower gardens and pleasure grounds, extending far and wide and finally melting into the vast woodland acreage beyond the horizon,” notes Trimble.

“When I garden, I create not just for this day but for the future,” she says, now seated in her glassed-in aviary with a view of her manicured parterre in the Garden District of New Orleans. “What drew me to Afton Villa was that garden and the history — 1848 — all those things that happened there.”

Beauty within

The love and beauty resides not only in the Trimble gardens, but within Trimble herself. She moves gracefully, quietly, like a butterfly touching the bloom of a pink azalea. Her voice is warm and full, perfectly harmonious with the ambient sounds of a country garden. Literate and well-read, she’s quick to offer her view or interpretation of a novel or an event, always gracious. And she is still learning, still open to understanding more as the stacks of books testify placed beside chairs throughout her home.

Memories

Trimble still remembers the garden her mother, Emma Harvey Munson, tended at their family home along Bayou Black in Houma, Louisiana.

“I remember she had a room full of sprays for her roses.” Her father, Joseph Jones Munson, was chairman of the South Coast Sugar Corp.

The purchase of the Afton Villa acreage and estate likely would never have occurred were it not first for the love between Genevieve Munson and Bud Trimble.

How they met

They met at Louisiana State University in the late 1930s as journalism majors and editors of the school paper, The Reveille.

“I always wanted to write,” Trimble said. Her preference “was feature-writing where she would meet someone and tell their story.”

As it happened, she signed up for Robert Penn Warren’s yearlong class on writing fiction. Warren was new to LSU, and along with Cleanth Brooks had just started The Southern Review, the literary magazine, which published work by such writers as Wallace Stevens, Katherine Anne Porter, Ford Maddox Ford and Aldous Huxley.

“It was a small class, maybe 19 or 20 students. I liked him very much. He spoke for the duration of each class, and it was like a grand soliloquy. But he never looked at us as he spoke. He stared out of the window behind us. I always wondered what he saw out of that window and thought he must find us very boring.”

Genevieve later realized that Warren was likely writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “All the King’s Men” at the time and “probably had his mind on his own novel.”

Trimble’s novel

Warren’s students had one assignment: to write a novel. At the time, Trimble loved Daphne du Maurier Dapheny’s “Rebecca,” and she wrote in that embellished prose.

What did Warren think of her novel?

“He urged me to pursue journalism,” she said.

World War II intervened in the marriage of Gen and Bud. Bud went into the Navy and piloted PT boats alongside John F. Kennedy. Gen moved to Chicago to write copy for Marshal Fields and Tabu perfume. She also wrote short stories for Seventeen and Today’s Woman magazines. After the war, they moved to The French Quarter in New Orleans, and Bud found success leading Merrill Lynch there.

Friends and coffee

At that time in the late 1940s, Gen walked to a nearby coffee shop, The Coffee Pot, and conversed regularly with Tennessee Williams, Sherwood Anderson and Grace King. She joined The Salon, a woman’s social club headed then by the famous journalist Dorothy Dix. (pseudonym for Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, Dix wrote the book: “How to Win and Hold a Husband”). “Dorothy had such a quick wit,” Trimble recalls.

Still in existence

The Salon still exists, its mission to continue the traditions of New Orleans. Housed in rooms once painted what Trimble calls a “New Orleans beige,” Thursday programs covered literature, art, traditions of the creole life, history of the quarter, the nation and the world. Hodding Carter and Harnett Kane spoke there several times.

She says The Salon was not formed for “little ladies having tea,” she said. “They were the primary influence for saving the Vieux Carré. These were intellectual people. There were more women like that when I first joined. They were very avant-garde, perhaps more so then, than now.”

After years of driving by the front gates, the Trimbles acquired Afton Villa in 1972. “Vines grew like a mantle over everything. The park across the ravine was knee-deep in leaves,” she writes. “And right in the middle with the highest visibility was the great, unmanageable, unsightly hulk of Gothic ruin, with full-grown native trees springing out from the crevices of the stones.”

They engaged help, and for five years cut, raked, and removed “literally tons of debris and vines.”

Trimble intuited the beauty resting underneath, and her desire to write and “tell someone’s story” blossomed in the restoration of Afton Villa. In recreating the garden rooms on the grounds, Gen brought their stories to life not by pen, but while digging with a garden spade. On many levels, the ongoing restoration of Afton Villa is a love story of the Trimbles and of the Villa’s former owners, all couples very much in love.

Reading the grounds

The grounds “read” like chapters of a novel, the outdoor rooms each tell a story, from The Ruins Garden, The Daffodil Valley, The Music Room, and The Ponds.

Trimble turns 95 in July, and she considers returning to a writing project she set aside long ago. “It’s about L'Île Dernière, the last isle off the coast of Louisiana, the one that’s disappearing.

This story was originally published July 31, 2016 at 12:05 AM with the headline "A labor of love, Afton Villa’s garden."