The Row Garden

The Row Garden The stone walls around the Row Garden, built around 1938, are the oldest from what was the Joe N. Howell Landscape Nursery.

The Row Garden is a gracefully landscaped “room” that’s perfect for small, elegant gatherings. It gets its name from the rows of vegetable beds that used to fill it (seen above outlined in red). The beds were made of extremely heavy, rebar-reinforced concrete pads, placed vertically in the ground. The concrete plates defining each bed were salvaged from another building somewhere near the Tennessee River. A number of these pads now are laid horizontally and make up the patio entrance to the Row Garden. It was originally the Howell family vegetable garden, conveniently near the house.

The Howell Nurseries’ oldest rock walls, built around 1938, surround the garden. When the northeast side began giving way under pressure from the roots of a huge old weeping beech, we opened that wall space and used more of the pavers to create a broad, low-rise staircase from the Row Garden down to the Martha H. Ashe garden. 

The Row Garden’s central grass lawn is bordered by redbud trees and perennials such as native ferns, roses, Black-Eyed Susan, and asters. Tucked into one corner under a towering Kentucky coffee tree is another reminder of the past – a 1930s composter, surrounded by trademark Howell Nurseries rock walls.

Nearby is a new shade garden, designed by a master gardener, and soon to be full of native trillium and 20-30 species of native ferns. Horticulture students will learn here and the shady beauty will complement the Row Garden, once humble vegetables, now formal beauty.