The Blount-Bridgers House Garden has been chosen by the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina to receive the 2009 Minnette C. Duffy Landscape Preservation Award.

The Duffy Award is North Carolina’s highest award for preservation, restoration or maintenance of landscapes, gardens, streetscape or grounds related to historical structures. It includes a $500 stipend.

The Blount-Bridgers Garden was chosen “because of the high degree of attention to detail … Archaeological research and a study of plants from when the house was built in 1808,” said Renee Elder of N.C. Preservation.

“The federal style mansion deserves beautiful grounds and receives care thanks to ‘weekly weeders’ and other volunteers who devoted so much time to the garden.”

Sylvia Nash of Tarboro made the nomination. She is a member of the Blount-Bridgers Foundation and immediate past president of Preservation North Carolina.

“This award is very, very well deserved,” Nash said. “A lot of people put a lot of effort into that garden, which is a jewel in Tarboro, but nobody has worked on it harder like Candis Owens. Her efforts are unending.”

Owens is chairwoman of the Blount-Bridgers House Garden Committee and organized the weekly weeders, a group that meets Wednesday mornings and weeds the garden. The weeders include Dana Alexander, Sallie Carlisle, Jeni Filbrun, Barb Getzug, Patty Moss, Maryann Rettino, Valerie Strickland and Gloria Wooding.

“It’s a devoted and committed group,” Owens said.

The Blount-Bridgers House Garden Committee was formed for the purpose of landscaping the property. A plan was drawn in the 1990s by landscape architect Chip Callaway, made possible by a bequest from a prominent local family.

The first actual planting was begun and tended by two local Garden Clubs and was enhanced with plants, trees and bulbs from other historic sites in the area (including irises and day lilies from Coolmore Plantation).

A grant from the state in the early ’90s enabled the Garden Committee to engage Tarboro citizen Loretta Lautzenheiser and her firm, Coastal Carolina Research, to conduct a thorough archaeological survey of the grounds. CCR found an office, a garden house, a kitchen, a cat cemetery, a well, a cistern and the location of the brick making operation. Armed with this “ghost plan,” the committee could map out a garden.

Beginning with and relying on citizen volunteers, the Garden Committee created a frame worthy of a plantation home. Workers were high school students, the Town of Tarboro Public Works crew, residents of the Tarboro Community Outreach Shelter, local garden clubs and many, many enthusiastic gardeners from all of Edgecombe County.

Today the Blount-Bridgers House Garden covers the entire block. There is a fenced perennial garden with walks and benches, a kitchen garden near the Philips dependency and two shade gardens. The sunny beds on the outer perimeter have been planted with native evergreen and deciduous trees, shrubs and bulbs.

“Plants we have in the Garden are from Tarboro residents' gardens,” Owens said. “Native perennials have a better survival rate.”

Irrigation was added last year, and Owens is optimistic about plants surviving.