Pond Spring annual plant sale

If gardening is your passion, you’ll want to be at the annual Pond Spring event, Miss Annie Wheeler’s Heirloom Plant Sale on Saturday, March 31 at 9:00 am.

The Alabama Historical Commission and Pond Spring are pleased to announce the annual event which attracts not only gardeners, but people who love antiques, history buffs, and those who are aficionados of the architectural beauty of historic Southern homes such as Pond Spring. 

You’ll want to mark your calendars to visit Miss Annie’s Heirloom Plant Sale where you can purchase a plant from the site’s historic garden. The plants sold at this event have been propagated from original heirloom plants cultivated at Pond Spring by the General’s daughter, Miss Annie, nearly a century ago. 

There are a wide variety of plants available for purchase including daffodils, irises, daylilies, spider lilies, spirea, forsythia, and more – all harvested from one of Lawrence County’s famous historic gardens. Proceeds from the plant sale will fund future restoration efforts on the fifty-acre site.

“Miss Annie Wheeler loved her gardens and cultivated them for over 60 years,” said Kara Long, site director of Pond Spring. “After almost 10 years here, I’m still amazed every spring when I drive through the gate. We are lucky that Miss Annie’s original plantings still grow and flourish on the site she designed. My hope is that some day we can restore the gardens to the way they were when she was here. We have the photos and we know what it looked like at that time, we can tell the story of the original garden.”

The gardens were neglected for a long time becoming over-run with kudzu vines which accidently sculpted many of the original boxwoods into twisted, otherworldly shaped topiaries of a sort. Recently, there has been an effort to recreate them as they were in Miss Annie’s day. Her love for the gardens and woodlands surrounding Pond Spring is well documented.

According to Long’s research there were many benches, bird baths and arbors in the garden when Miss Annie walked these paths. She took great pride in the house but it was especially the gardens that spoke to her heart. She made it a point to let people from the area know that this was a place they could come to picnic and she loved sharing her gardens with the hundreds of people who accepted her invitation to use them. 

Anyone wishing to donate money of garden artifacts, statuary, bird bath, urns or arbors should contact Kara Long. These donations will help to make the garden the showplace it once was. 

With the effort of restoring Pond Spring’s lovely gardens comes the need for volunteers. Long encourages anyone who loves to garden or just get out in the fresh air and do something worthwhile to contact her about volunteering their time and talents to this effort. 

Come out for a visit and purchase some living history for your own garden on March 31. 

For more information, contact Kara Long at pondspringdirector@gmail.com or 256-637-8513.

Find Pond Spring on Facebook or visit ahc.alabama.gov.

Pond Spring is a historic property of the Alabama Historical Commission and is located in Lawrence County in Hillsboro, three miles east of Courtland, on Alabama Highway 20 (US Alt. 72).