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Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens: America’s Only Aquatic Garden National Park
Kelly McEvers: Gina Geffrard has a very specific memory about the first time she encountered the place we’re talking about today.
Gina Geffrard: In 2019, I filmed an episode of House Hunters. And one of the houses on the show is across the street from the gardens. I remember talking to the producers of the show, asking what is across the street. And they didn’t really know, so we did research and we found out it was Kenilworth Park.
Amanda McGowan: You were on House Hunters?
Kelly: That’s our producer, Amanda, following up on the most important detail here.
Gina: I love that that’s the follow up. But yeah, it’s been a while now. I filmed in 2019 and it aired in 2020, but it was a really fun experience.
Kelly: Gina was on House Hunters looking to buy in Washington, D.C.—specifically in the Kenilworth neighborhood, which is northeast of downtown along the Anacostia River. The neighborhood had this park that got Gina’s attention. It had lots of trails. It was near the river. So pretty soon after moving in, Gina would go running and biking there.
It seemed like a normal park, until she started exploring.
Gina: I didn’t realize what I was looking at when I first saw or entered the gardens. And even many more times after, I still didn’t realize where I was.
Kelly: One day, Gina saw this gravel path …
Gina: … and to the left and to your right are more trees. Maybe there’s some flowers growing on the ground, a lot of green grass, and then eventually you pass a second set of gates. And then when you walk through that second gate, in front of you is just a huge, vast number of ponds.
If you come in in the summer, especially June and July, and even in August, you’ll see these ponds filled with water lilies and lotuses, and it’s a sight to behold.
Kelly: This is Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens: a sort of secret oasis in Washington, D.C. right next to a much larger urban park; so people often miss it.
Today, by the way, Gina is not just a fan of the place. She’s actually the interim executive director for the Friends of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. That’s an organization that cares for the park alongside the National Park Service.
Gina: One of the reasons why we’re a hidden gem is because we are hidden. Parks are pretty common in the city. The D.C. area actually has a large number of parks for the number of people that reside here, but you rarely see a garden, and you rarely see an aquatic garden; in fact, we’re the only aquatic garden that’s a national park in the country.
Kelly: I’m Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Washington.org. And today we’re going to a very unusual national park: a floating park, an oasis of ponds filled with lilies and lotuses. And we’re also going to dive into its backstory, which goes all the way back to a Civil War veteran and his daughter, who fought the federal government to protect her father’s legacy.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Gina: We had some students come in last week for a field trip, and some chaperones—their parents—came and they didn’t know about the gardens. And when they walked through, the first thing they said was: “There’s a lake back here.” When the plants are not in bloom, it looks like a bunch of lakes.
Kelly: Here’s Gina Geffrard again.
Gina: When you want to see all these flowers and plants blooming, and birds and butterflies, the summer is the time to come. The lotuses are the star because they grow so tall. That’s really what you see when you come to the gardens, because it’s not just small little plants. There are these huge, beautiful flowers that bloom in a variety of colors.
Kelly: So how did the only aquatic garden national park come to be? It goes back to the Civil War and a veteran named Walter B. Shaw.
Walter was originally from a little island off the coast of Maine, but in 1863, he joined the Union Army and the following year, he saw some very intense fighting in Virginia. During the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, Walter got shot. Doctors were able to save his life, but they did have to partially amputate his right arm.
After the war, Walter stayed around Washington D.C. He actually completely relearned to write using his left hand, and he got a job working at the U.S. Treasury Department as a clerk. About a decade went by, and Walter and his wife saved up some money and bought a little plot of marshy land next to the Anacostia River. And something about this land inspired Walter because soon he started, as he called it, playing in the water.
Gina: He decided to dig a pond with one arm and planted these flowers, and they started blooming so lovingly. So much so, he dug more ponds with one arm. And the plants started to thrive some more. And he then created a business called W.B. Shaw Lily Company.
Kelly: At first, this was Walter’s side hustle, a hobby. He spent time perfecting his growing methods. One old newspaper article said he had trouble with turtles eating the roots of his plants, but over time, he built the business up. And in 1902, he started selling water lilies full time.
Walter shipped his lilies around D.C. and even further out to cities like New York and Philadelphia. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel was apparently a big customer.
You have to wonder how they would have mailed delicate plants like this in the days before refrigeration or two-day shipping. One article from the time revealed Walter’s method. He would cut the flowers first thing in the morning at 5 a.m., tightly wrap each one in thin sheets of lead, and then in wax paper, and supposedly this way they could stand up to a week of travel. When they arrived at their destinations and were put in water, they would come back to life.
While Walter was out digging his ponds and caring for his lilies, he had a frequent companion: his daughter, Helen. She was about 5 years old when they moved to the marsh, and throughout her childhood, she went out and helped her father dig his lily ponds, learning all about the plants and the business.
As a young woman, Helen got married and had a child, but tragically, both her daughter and her husband died within a few years of each other. After that, Helen started running the family business.
Gina: When Helen Shaw took it over, it really boomed. Helen started building structures on the property, so the greenhouses you’ve seen are from the time when she owned the business, including the visitor center, which is original, and two of the hothouses, which are original.
Kelly: And Helen expanded the gardens from nine ponds to 42. She sourced new lilies from all over the world, eventually selling 3,000 to 5,000 lilies every day. She was even the first woman in D.C. to hold a commercial driver’s license, which she used to deliver flowers.
Gina: And then she also opened up the gardens to the public. So this is when we have not just the selling of the plants and the flowers, but people from the public coming to see this beautiful place that they created.
This was the 1930s, right? So if you can imagine at that time, there were still many challenges for women in America. And so for her to not only run a business, but to have the business thrive and also fight the government for it. She fought the government for her garden. I mean, she was pretty fierce.
Kelly: So let’s talk about Helen versus the federal government. In the late 1930s, the government decided they wanted to own more land along the Anacostia River because they wanted to expand public riverfront green space and also do this massive dredging project of the river’s mud flats as a way to combat mosquitoes and malaria. All of this would have destroyed the aquatic gardens.
Helen spent nearly 20 years in a legal battle over the garden’s future.
Gina: We do have writings from Helen Shaw Fowler and her attorney at the time, kind of going back and forth. He advised her to sell. She did not want to. Ultimately she did. The government purchased the land from Helen—begrudgingly on her part—and so Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens has been owned by the National Park Service since.
Kelly: In the end, though, the government did not end up tearing up the gardens like they’d originally planned. Instead, they turned it into a national park.
Gina: And we probably could thank Helen for saving the gardens by opening them up to visitors, because people then knew what was there. It could be fair to say that had it remained a private business, and people didn’t know about it, it could probably be something completely entirely different today.
Kelly: So then what happens when a neighborhood garden becomes a national park? As the Shaw Lily Company, the park was part of daily life in the area, a place of recreation, a place of work. But after it became a national park in 1938, the neighborhood around it started changing.
Gina: Eventually the Kenilworth neighborhood over the decades becomes a predominantly Black community. And because it’s a national park site, I believe this is when they start building the fences that are currently around the gardens for a variety of reasons. And the fences, they kind of bring some tension in the community.
Kelly: And there was more going on next door. In the early 1940s, the federally appointed D.C. government made a piece of land right next to the aquatic gardens into a giant landfill where trash was openly burned. The landfill stayed open until 1970, and environmental cleanup only began in the late 1990s. But throughout all these changes, the gardens were still meaningful to people in the community.
Gina: We’ve heard from many residents of the Kenilworth neighborhood, of the Eastland Gardens neighborhood, of the Parkside neighborhood. Really fun stories from the 60s and the 70s, when they used to sneak into the gardens in the wintertime because the ponds would freeze and they would ice skate around over the ponds.
Hearing those stories is really fun. And the gardens do mean a lot to the people in the neighborhood, but sometimes the relationship is not what it should be.
Kelly: Locals worked hard to connect the gardens with the community, like Walter McDowney, also known as “Ranger Mack”: a park ranger who grew up across the street. He created a junior ranger program to bring neighborhood kids into the gardens. Still, Gina says that by the early 2000s, most visitors to the gardens were from out of town. This was around the time the Friends of the Aquatic Gardens formed.
Gina: So a bunch of volunteers who loved gardening, who loved plants, who loved the park, got together and informally started Friends of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. And as the nonprofit grew, it not only helped build volunteerism, but it helped to bridge the relationship between the National Park Service and the community—and until this day, we’ve been doing the same thing.
Kelly: Today, there are many ways to enjoy the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Photographers and birders love it. There are fitness classes, so you can do yoga and Pilates among the lilies. And just last year, the Friends piloted a program to keep the park open late in the summer.
Gina: So for a very long time, the park hours were 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. So you can imagine if you were working, you really never got to go to the gardens. Last year, the Friends group helped to pay to staff the gardens so we could be open until 8 p.m.
Kelly: The biggest event of the year is in July, the Lotus and Water Lily Festival, which draws thousands of people every year.
It’s been nearly 150 years since Walter B. Shaw dug his first lily pond. And today, the gardens he left behind are as beautiful as any national park, but also part of people’s regular daily lives. Gina says she’s actually had a chance to meet one of Shaw’s descendants and get his take on what the park is like today.
Gina: He loves the gardens. He loves the gardens, and I have asked him like, what would your great, great grandfather think about this? And he’s just like, “Well he would be overjoyed,” you know? A lot of people, when they start a business, even if they have the wildest dreams, you never really know what could happen. I’m pretty sure that Walter B. Shaw, when he started a hobby, did not think there would be a 20,000-person festival occurring, just celebrating this garden, celebrating his creation. I hope we’re doing a good job in making them and their ancestors proud.
Kelly: Entry to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is free and does not require an entrance pass. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, Washington, D.C. is of course right at the center. Where else can you walk to brunch through America’s oldest urban national park or enjoy a nightcap with a few of our nation’s monuments? Check out Washington.org to plan your D.C. getaway.
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Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.
