Isabel Busbee in her garden, Raleigh Times, c. 1936
Gardening friendships are a special kind. Mostly we each garden at home… meaning we aren’t together. It’s very different from, say quilting or golf – both hobbies that allow socializing while pursuing your hobby. The garden club is what brings us together and where we get a chance to talk over garden delights and problems with another informed gardener, to get new ideas and share our own latest discoveries.
When we meet, it’s the plantswomen that keep the conversations on gardening. These are the passionate gardeners , the plant geeks, who shepherd the projects, who unconsciously mentor in every conversation just because they are such dedicated gardeners. Without them the conversations could –and do--easily stray into other channels.
The Raleigh Garden Club’s first such quintessential plant woman was Isabel Bronson Busbee. She made up a life around gardening and plants: crafted a business to support herself and her passion using the garden club as a network. She set a pattern that was followed by a number of other plants women in down the years, among them Elizabeth Lawrence, Mary Lee McMillan, and even down to today with me.
Isabel was from a prominent Raleigh family, who were leaders of the artsy group. Isabel was born in 1880. As adults, she and her two sisters shared a house and needed to be self-supporting. Early on the young Isabel held the position of secretary to the President of NC State (then called NC Agricultural College) in 1912.
She studied landscape design at Lowthorpe School up north in Massachusetts, though she didn’t complete a degree. She returned home and started a landscape architecture business out of her house, probably in the 1920s. Later she brought in Elizabeth Lawrence, newly graduated from NC State’s LA program, to work with her. The 1930’s was a hard time for a Landscape Architecture business though, and it seems she treated the GC’s projects as “work” and sometimes the Club paid her for designs.
There is a great image from one of Elizabeth’s letters of a Sunday afternoon. Elizabeth describes escaping from her own noisy home and going to the Busbee’s house near today’s Cameron Village. Isabel and her sisters were quietly listening to a concert on the radio. During it the sisters were sewing, and Isabel was cutting out pictures of plants from a garden catalog. Elizabeth loved being able to listen to the music without distractions.
She was also very involved in the Raleigh Garden Club. In its first year, she was appointed to report on the requirements for the new Club to become affiliated with the National Garden Clubs, then known as The National Council of State Garden Club Federations. She was also involved in writing the Club’s constitution. She was elected President of the Club for the term 1926-27. She spoke at the garden clubs of the area and became quite well known in Southern gardening circles. So much so that in 1935, she was unanimously endorsed by the Club for president of the Garden Club of North Carolina. She refused the position… why is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps she was just too busy to take it on? Or was there a difference in opinion within the GNCN administration? We do know that when she refused, she made a motion to support the current president’s choice of successor without discussion . Sort of an interesting way of saying “no.”
She was also an officer in the American Horticultural Society in 1931, and she wrote often for them.
As a landscape architect, Isabel’s bigger projects were the Andrew Johnson Memorial landscaping (1937) at NC State (then called NC State College) , the Farmville Community Park, and some residential gardens. She was involved in the landscaping for the new Little Theatre and in planting shade trees for city streets. She was probably involved too with the design of the Rose Garden and Glenwood Esplanade, though there is no record of payment for these and the Esplanade design is attributed sometimes to her assistant, Elizabeth Lawrence.
Plant women are observational gardeners. She kept records and notes on each year and each plant she was interested in. Making all-season blooming gardens is a tough proposition. Isabel succeeded because she knows her garden, not as a clump, but as individual plants she knew by name, seasonal habits, how well they would “play with others.”
Can't we get some one to invent a word that means the same in withstanding heat that" hardy " means in withstanding cold? I t would be a very useful word to employ for a number of plants that are grown successfully here. I should like to apply it to several that I have been experimenting with lately, and find very well suited to our conditions. The Peach Bells, or Peach-leaf Campanula (Campanula persiscifalia), has proven itself a most valuable plant with me. Neither heat nor cold, drought nor excessive moisture seems to bother it. It goes right on growing and persisting from year to year, and blooms beautifully every summer. It is really a charming plant, with its lovely blue or white bells, and much more satisfactory than the Canterbury Bells.
Isabel was a strong advocate for floral design and especially for the new design trend sweeping the country from Asian influences, in particular Ikebana. She was involved with many flower shows. The last mention I have of Isabel in The Raleigh Garden Club is her writing the plans for a Victory Garden Harvest Show in 1942, with the proceeds to go to the Emergency and Navy Relief funds.
Isabel passed away in 1966, at the ripe age of 86. She was RGC’s first plantswoman and she was extraordinary. She helped create a “career garden clubber”, a role that sustained her economically, and made her passion for gardening and plants the basis of her life’s work. Elizabeth Lawrence, and other woman who followed in her footsteps, created a Southern culture of plantswomen that still influence us today. If Susan Iden brought a vision of what Raleigh and RGC could do together, Isabel made the plans so it would happen. She treated the garden club projects with the same professionalism as her own business projects. She found many kindred spirits in the club and plant women still made up the backbone of RGC. They bring news of new cultivars and great garden books, the ones you turn to with plant questions, the leaders of many a project and the best friends a gardener could have.