In a sloping green bowl of earth in the Shenandoah Valley, Leigh Ann Beavers listens to the vibrating dawn chorus, her head still resting on her pillow. Above the roof of her clapboard German farmhouse in Raphine, Virginia, a raven and a red-tailed hawk each protect their young, chasing each other across the nine acres dotted with native oaks, black walnut, and witch hazel. Outside the bedroom windows, phoebes feed their babies, tucked into mossy nests built into the crooks of the house; in the brick chimney, swifts and their nestlings purr.
The entire hollow trembles with the sounds of life, but it hasn’t always been so loud. It took decades of rewilding the land, planting natives and purging pesticides, to bring back the natural orchestra. “The most important aspect of my garden is that I want as many organisms to live here as possible and be able to raise their families,” Beavers says. “I love these swifts as much as my children.”
Before there was a humming patchwork, there were flat, razed fields. In 2003, when Beavers, pregnant with her first child, first stepped onto the property with her husband, the geneticist and biologist Paul Cabe, the land was bare, the air quiet. But a gigantic pair of hundred-year-old Persian walnut trees (and the black rat snakes slithering on them) completely won over Beavers, who is an artist and art professor, convincing the couple to look past the fact that the rural location would require a thirty-minute commute to their new jobs at Washington and Lee University. The two naturalists had codirected an Appalachian nature camp and were exchanging outdoor classrooms for art studios and science labs—or so they thought.
Not long after they moved in, they placed their acreage under a conservation easement and began creating their wild sanctuary. “I wanted my children to grow up in a house where they could look out every window and see that there were birds and insects,” Beavers says. She planted her mother’s prized daylilies, added raised beds for vegetables, and eventually built a sandbox for their three boys to play in as they grew up alongside towers of tomatoes, dark green bunches of kale, and fragrant clouds of herbs. She forbade pesticides and dedicated eight acres to wildlife, researching native species and building the habitats that would beckon them home. As soon as the kids could work, she tasked them with pulling weeds, relocating seedlings, and digging potatoes.
Now the garden rolls out as a blend of shaggy meadows and vegetable and flower patches, threaded with ponds and stone-lined paths for meandering. In late summer, Beavers clips dahlias and zinnias, plopping them in vases scattered throughout every room. “I always have flowers in the house; that’s how I grew up,” Beavers says. “I don’t ever not pick flowers.” In the fall, the plants wither into a welcome feast for migrating birds: Black-eyed Susans become dried domes of seeds, sunflowers transform into big plates of kernels. Foxes, groundhogs, coyotes, and flying squirrels sneak through footpaths of blackberries, goldenrod, and beauty-berries. In the pond, which Cabe added one year as a Christmas gift, snapping turtles, water snakes, and seven species of salamanders, including red-spotted newts, take cover under water lilies and watercress. In the patio garden, where Beavers folded alpine strawberries and sedums in the dirt between pieces of sandstone, four species of frogs splash into a pocket of water. “When the boys were little,” she says, “they learned the natural history of frogs from being outside, not from a book.”
Just as the land became a place of learning for her children, and a spring of inspiration for her own sketchbook, it also acts as an extension of the university classroom for young artists. Trailed by her three Russell terriers, Beavers leads her printmaking and drawing students through the garden paths, pointing out singing titmice and nesting bluebirds. The most rewarding lessons come from leaving her pupils in the garden, letting them explore and sketch whatever captivates them. “It will always be my natural impulse to teach outside and teach out of my surroundings,” she says. “I want to show people these things.”
Afterward, the students gather to share their drawings in the art studio barn. They pass around pages of swimming tadpoles, flowering branches, and clusters of berries, a communal catalogue of their time together outside. “I want it to be a garden that I enjoy, but at the same time, it has to be a host,” Beavers says. “Gardens remind people that we’re a part of nature, that we share it with so many other beings.”
