Founders Memorial Garden

The gardens on the property were conceived, designed, and installed during the tenure of Hubert Owens, the founder and first dean of the landscape architecture program at the university during the 1940s. Financial support for the installation of the Gardens came from several individual garden club organizations around the state. Today, the Garden is maintained by the College of Environment and Design, and serves as a teaching resource for the College as well as for other units across the campus.

The Founders Memorial Garden commemorates the twelve founders of the first American Garden Club, the Ladies Garden Club of Athens, which was founded in 1891. With funds raised by the Garden Club of Georgia, Dean Hubert B. Owens, his staff, and students of the Landscape Architecture Department designed the garden. The layout of the two and one-half acre series of gardens, the grounds of the former Headquarters House for the Garden Club of Georgia, consists of a formal boxwood garden, two courtyards, a terrace, a perennial garden and an arboretum as well as two informal areas, one dedicated to Johnnie Kyle Woodruff of Columbus, Georgia. The rose-brick, Greek Revival style house was built in 1857. The house and garden are on the National Register of Historic Places as well as the Georgia Register of Historic Places.