Norfolk Botanical Garden Trades Roses for Lights
175 acres beside the airport, built by WPA hands in the 1930s, and now in its winter costume: the garden's holiday season is one of Hampton Roads' great cold-weather rituals.
Norfolk Botanical Garden is the city's big green secret in plain sight: 175 acres of themed gardens and waterways beside Lake Whitehurst, founded in 1938 and built substantially by Works Progress Administration crews — including the remarkable African American WPA gardeners whose azalea plantings made its early reputation and whose story the garden now formally honors.
The collection is the region's living library: one of the East Coast's significant azalea and camellia collections, a rose garden that peaks in late spring, the NATO Woods, a butterfly house in season, and miles of paths through plantings that make the garden a research collection wearing a park's clothes. November turns its calendar: the fall camellias — the sasanquas — bloom as the summer garden sleeps, and the garden's famous holiday light display transforms the paths into the region's drive-and-walk winter spectacle.
The lights are a logistics operation of their own: crews string the garden's trees and beds through the fall, and the evening crowds it draws are among the largest the garden hosts all year — a deliberate inversion for an institution built for daylight. For Norfolk families it has become a fixed point of the season, as reliable as the first cold snap.
Go on a weekday evening if you can, park once, and walk slowly: the rose garden under lights, the waterways reflecting double, the camellias blooming improbably in the cold. The garden was planted by people paid to build something that would outlast hard times. Every November, lit against the early dark, it does.
