Wild Women in the Garden

As spring arrives and the days grow longer and warmer, our garden, indistinguishable from the backyard lawn while covered with a blanket of snow, is starting to show itself again.  Early flowers are blooming, later flowering plants are pushing their green stems through the earth. It occurs to me that gardens rewrite what power looks like—steady, undeniable growth that takes root, spreads, grows sometimes invisibly but always undeniably. A garden persists, coexists, influences. There is something quietly radical about a garden.

And so I am reminded of a winter visit to the Voices of the Garden monument in Richmond Virginia.  The monument has gathered women—leaders, builders, fighters, creators—from more than 400 years of Virginia’s past and placed them not on towering pedestals, but at eye level. You don’t look up at them. You walk among them.

Voices from the Garden draws visitors into an oval forum to interact with the twelve women who await them. At the center stands a bronze sundial on a granite pedestal. Tempered glass panels, a metaphor for the social filter that has long obscured women’s accomplishments from public view, provide space for the names of additional important women of history, with room to add the names of women of today and tomorrow. (Virginia Women's Monument Commission)

As the monument’s glass panels illustrate, for a long time, women’s stories weren’t carved into stone

—they were filtered out entirely. So this corner in Richmond’s Capital Square is not just a tribute to famous figures like Maggie Lena Walker or Martha Washington. It’s a chorus—educators, Indigenous leaders, entrepreneurs, formerly enslaved women who reshaped their futures. Women who didn’t wait for permission to matter. (Virginia Assembly)

This isn’t a monument about perfection. It’s about presence. About claiming space in a story that once left you out. About standing—together—and saying: we were always here.

Can’t you imagine the early morning whispering, the late night conversations and strategy sessions that led to revolutionary actions?

Wouldn’t you love to have coffee in the garden with these 11 Wild Women?

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• Anne Burras Laydon

  Early English settler; among the first women in Jamestown

• Cockacoeske

  Indigenous leader who united tribes and negotiated treaties

• Mary Draper Ingles

  Survivor of captivity who escaped and journeyed 500+ miles home

• Martha Washington

  Foundational political and social figure in early America

• Clementina Rind

  One of the first female newspaper printers in Virginia

• Elizabeth Keckley

  Formerly enslaved woman who became a successful entrepreneur and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln

• Maggie Lena Walker

  First Black woman in the U.S. to charter a bank

• Sarah Garland Boyd Jones

  First woman licensed to practice medicine in Virginia

• Laura Lu Copenhaver

  Textile industry leader who created jobs for Appalachian women

• Virginia Estelle Randolph

  Influential Black educator with national impact

• Adèle Goodman Clark

  Leader in the fight for women’s voting rights

Read more about the women and monument