LongHouse Reserve's 2023 Landscape Luncheon, which will honor the American horticulturist Abra Lee, will kick off at 10 a.m. on Sept. 9 with a lecture by Ms. Lee at Hoie Hall of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in East Hampton. It will continue at 12:30 with lunch and programs at LongHouse.
Ms. Lee, who in January was named director of horticulture at the Historic Oakland Foundation in Atlanta, graduated from Auburn University with a degree in ornamental horticulture, and is an alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows, a global network of public horticulture professionals.
As a writer and historian, her work has been featured in The New York Times, Fine Gardening, and Veranda magazine. She is the founder of the social media platform Conquer the Soil, which raises horticultural awareness through Black garden history and current events.
Her lecture will be informed by her forthcoming book, "Conquer the Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country's Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers," set for publication in February 2026 by Timber Press.
During a recent phone conversation, Ms. Lee traced the book's origin to 2010, when she was the landscape manager for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
"In my late 20s, when I was chosen to lead the landscaping at the airport, it was real 'imposter syndrome.' I was thinking, Can I do this?"
Her mother, a history teacher who grew up in the rural South, told her she wasn't the first Black person to lead the landscaping at an airport. "She knew many men and women who were gardeners or horticulturalists."
The stories she told her daughter "opened up this whole portal for me, of people who came before me that didn't just spend a year or two in the world of horticulture, they spent their whole lives in it."
What propelled her going forward was that when invited to talk about the Atlanta airport and airport landscaping, "at the end I would always sprinkle in a garden history story about some of these people I'll be talking about at LongHouse. People would have more questions about those stories than they did about airport landscapes."
She also found that audience members, especially older people, would come forward with their own stories. "That is what kept me on it, because it was almost nostalgic, and it stirred up something in people, when they went back to a time when they had joyous memories of horticulture and the people, so that's how I got on this road."
The writing of the book took a pause when, three years ago, she became a caregiver for her mother, who had dementia and cancer. "My mother's the reason I know these stories, so there was no way I wasn't going to take care of her. I have no regrets there."
Toward the end of her mother's illness, she realized that "the way the book was going, it was me writing a bunch of profiles." The interruption led her to look deeper into the details, "and what I was seeing is that so many of these people knew each other, showed up in the same spaces, at the same conferences, and they would give talks. So it went from being a book of profiles to a real narrative nonfiction story where you can see the interconnectedness of their lives."
Ms. Lee spends weekdays in Atlanta, but weekends in "the dirt road country of Barnesville, Georgia, where my mama was from. So I've got one foot in the city and one in the country."
She has never been to LongHouse. She is coming there at the invitation of its director, Carrie Rebora Barratt, with whom she serves on the board of the American Public Gardens Association.
