Abra Lee headlines Asheville’s annual gardening symposium
The Speaking of Gardening Symposium will convene its 24th annual event in August, with a two-day lecture series featuring acclaimed horticultural experts. Among the keynote presenters is Abra Lee, a 2019-2020 Longwood Gardens fellow who has worked as a county extension agent, an arborist for the city of Atlanta, and the landscape manager and horticulturist for two international airports.
Lee’s upcoming book is titled Conquer the Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers. She refers to the stories in the book, which are among those she will share during the symposium, as “love stories,” pointing out that “You don’t spend 20, 30, 40, or 50 years of your life gardening if you don’t love doing it.”
Her own love of horticulture was passed down to Lee through generations of family members, including her father, who was Director of Parks for the City of Atlanta. “Any time I had a free weekend, at least two or more times a month, I’d go around with my daddy playing Motown on the radio as he went to check on his parks.”
Oftentimes, when she wasn’t accompanying her father as he made his rounds, she’d travel with her uncle down to Barnesville, Georgia, about an hour away from Atlanta, to spend time on her grandmother’s farm. “I was learning urban arboriculture and horticulture in Atlanta, and then old-fashioned rural Black gardening at my grandmother’s. Her brothers were all farmers, too.”
At the time, “I thought everybody who lived in the city went to the country every weekend, because I didn’t know any better,” says Lee. “Later I realized that a lot of people in America today don’t have that kind of connection to gardening and the land. But my mother was an educator who taught history, and she was committed to us knowing that culture.”
Lee’s résumé was well cultivated by the time she was hired as landscape manager by Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport — the busiest airport in the world. Only 27 years old, she found herself in conference rooms with powerful executives — and with the responsibility for building and managing her own team. She asked her mentor, the internationally known landscape designer Ryan Gainey, for advice, and he suggested: “Learn your garden history.”
So Lee’s mother introduced her to historical figures such as gardener, naturalist, and Harlem Renaissance writer Effie Lee Newsome, author of the children’s book Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (published in 1940 and reissued in 2020 by Living Book Press). She also learned about figures like Asa Sims — a native of Asheville who became highly influential in Black horticulture in the 1930s — and Bessie Weaver, who entered the flower business in 1911 and was recognized by the International Florists’ Association as the first Black florist west of the Mississippi.
“Knowing this kind of history is uplifting,” says Lee, “and will help you follow your own passion in your garden.”
She adds: “It’s exciting for me each time I speak about these and other people who were so generous with resource sharing and helping other gardeners and nursery owners, even if they were their direct competitors.
“That’s what people who love to garden do.”
The Speaking of Gardening Symposium will be held at the Double Tree Inn by Hilton in Biltmore Village (115 Hendersonville Road, Asheville) on Friday, Aug. 11 and Saturday, Aug. 12 (information at speakingofgardening.org). To learn more about Abra Lee, visit conquerthesoil.com or her Twitter and Instagram accounts (@conquerthesoil).