This fall, something wonderful is about to happen at the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont: it will start to rise out of the ground.
Construction will begin on a new pedestrian bridge, the first visible piece of the Garden’s long-anticipated Phase I development. Work is expected to start by early October and continue through the winter. I hope you’ll forgive me if I can’t quite contain my excitement about it. After years of dreaming, planning, and designing, this is the moment our Garden truly begins to take shape.
The bridge itself is a small piece of a much bigger transformation underway on our 15 acres in McIntire Park, next door to the high school on Melbourne Road. Once it’s finished, it will span the stream that bisects the property, stitching together the two sides of the Garden and reaching out to the rest of McIntire Park and the neighborhoods just south of it. It’s a simple thing, really, just a way to walk from here to there, but it’s also exactly the kind of connection this Garden has always been about: to nature, to neighbors, and to each other.
Kjellstrom & Lee Construction is building the bridge and the other Phase I improvements. The firm brings a strong track record on institutional and cultural-sector projects. Mary Ann Thompson is our architecture firm, and Waterstreet Studio serves as our landscape architect of record. We’re so grateful to have all these firms walking this path with us.
The bridge is just one piece of a much fuller Phase I plan. In addition, we’re building a Discovery Garden designed for hands-on exploration, discovery, and play, a four-season Garden Pavilion with an 875-square-foot event space and flexible classroom, Native Gardens showcasing the plants of our region, a Parking Plaza with a central rain garden, and the underlying infrastructure, including power, water, sewage, and protective fencing, needed to keep the Garden going for generations.
It’s been a complicated journey to get to this point. Between 2017 and 2020, we completed our landscape foundation and design phase, a process led by landscape architects Mikyoung Kim Design and Waterstreet Studio and shaped by community input, that earned a 2019 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. From 2021 to 2023, we negotiated our land lease with the City of Charlottesville and completed the design and early construction of a stream restoration project. Since 2024, the stream restoration was completed, as was detailed design work on the buildings and landscape, and we submitted site plans to the city and county, clearing the way, at last, for the permits and construction.
We marked this moment with a groundbreaking ceremony this summer, surrounded by supporters, donors, and community partners who believed in this Garden and carried this project forward with their time, their talent, and their generosity. Board President Margaret Murray Bloom spoke that day, along with BGP Campaign Committee Co-Chair Pam Edmonds, Mayor Juandiego Wade, and our keynote speaker, University of Virginia’s School of Architecture Dean Malo Hutson. Standing together with them, watching years of late-night conversations and generations of renderings finally take root, was one of the proudest moments of my career.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Since 2019, we’ve hosted an average of 85 site tours and presentations each year for community organizations across Central Virginia, from youth groups like the Boys and Girls Club to organizations serving seniors, refugees and neighbors in historically underserved areas. We listen closely so that the Garden’s programs and amenities reflect what our neighbors actually want and need. This bridge, and everything being built alongside it, is a direct reflection of those ongoing conversations, resulting in a garden shaped, quite literally, by the community that will one day wander through it.
Sustainability was always a goal, and it’s woven into every part of the Phase I design. A rainwater harvesting system will gather stormwater and roof runoff from the Parking Plaza and Garden Pavilion, filtering it into an underground cistern before it resurfaces as irrigation. It’s quite literally rain given a second life. The new Garden Pavilion will feature rooftop solar panels and geothermal wells to help the building move toward net-zero energy use, along with bird-friendly glass and locally sourced building materials that reduce our carbon footprint.
That includes wood harvested on the site, which has a story all its own. Rather than becoming mulch or firewood, trees that come down for construction are being salvaged and milled right here on site through a partnership with the A School Sawmill Department, then air-dried and finished in a solar kiln built by A School students. That wood will become part of our new Garden Pavilion and select landscape features, amenities built, quite literally, from the trees that once graced our site.
We are not building this alone, and that is exactly the point. More than 43,000 volunteer hours since 2017 (valued at over $1.3 million) have gone into pulling invasive plants and tending this land; countless families and classes have joined us for field trips; and donors believed in this vision before there was much to show for it. All of it lives in what’s about to rise from this ground. Thank you for being part of it.
I hope you’ll come visit the Garden as the work unfolds, season by season. The Garden will remain open to visitors throughout construction. Building the bridge first opens access to the south side of the Garden for more trails and gathering areas, ensuring there’s enough space to continue to serve our mission.
You may notice some temporary changes as work progresses, and we’ll be sharing updates on our timeline and access changes along the way, so keep an eye out. If you’d like to follow the Garden’s progress or get involved as a volunteer, please visit the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont’s website for updates on the construction timeline and upcoming events. https://piedmontgarden.org/
About the Author:
Jill Trischman-Marks is a landscape architect with nearly 30 years of experience in Central Virginia and the Executive Director of the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont. After several years on the Garden’s Board of Directors, she retired her private practice to lead the organization, bringing deep design expertise and a strong commitment to accessibility, community partnership, and environmental stewardship.
During her tenure, Jill has worked to make the Garden more welcoming and to engage residents across the region in shaping its future. This year, the Garden reaches a transformational milestone as Phase I construction begins — including a pedestrian bridge, a Parking Plaza with a central Rain Garden, a Garden Pavilion, and a Discovery Garden. Donor support, volunteer efforts, and an amazing staff have been essential in bringing this long-held community vision to life.
Jill holds a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia. Her earlier work includes projects at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, and Poplar Forest.
