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The Natural Bridge Garden Club gathered at Natural Bridge State Park the week before Christmas to present the park with a painting from Anne Weede, local resident and garden club member who died in November 2021.
“How I wish Anne was present today to witness what I would call an intersection of two things she enjoyed tremendously — both art, and Natural Bridge Garden Club,” said retired Marine Corps Col. Richard Weede, Anne’s husband, during the presentation.
While art was long one of Anns’s passions, it was not always available to her.
“It took her a long time to get to the point where she had time to do the art. She spent 30 years as a Marine Corps officer’s wife, moving around every two years, every three years,” he said.
However, after his retirement, Anne’s art and commitment to the garden club bloomed.
“But when I retired from the Marine Corps in 1989 and came back to Lexington, she finally was able to use the talents that she had really harbored secretly all those years,” he said.
“If you’d give her a blank canvas and a handful of tubes of paint, an idea, a couple of brushes, she would be able to go out to her area that she painted,” Weed recalled. “Then she became lost.
“She would be lost in colors and brushstrokes, things like that. It might take her all day, and it wouldn’t matter a bit — she’d completely lost the idea of what the time was.”
Weede said the park was a fitting home for Anne’s painting.
“It’s going to reside, I understand, in a special committee room at Natural Bridge itself, and its great — Anne I think would be smiling right now, to have this kind of honor bestowed on one of her works.”
A member of the garden club, Ann Nay, recounted some of the history of the painting.
“Well, I think this came to be because we had a booth at Rockbridge Community Festival for many, many years. We had the booth, and we said, ‘We have to have a sign, something telling the public who we are.’ And Anne showed up with this beautiful painting,” said Nay.
“And just a year ago we did not have a booth at the festival. It just became too much, and times change and thinking changed. So we were deciding what we wanted to do with it. We wanted it to be seen; we didn’t want it to be hidden away,” she said.
“We felt that it would be very appropriate for Natural Bridge State Park to have it. And we’re just so thrilled that you’re going to accept it, and we want it to be where lots of people will see it.”
The donation was accepted by Jim Jones, park manager, who said that the painting, along with a photo and biography of Anne Weede, will be hung in one of the park’s interactive classrooms.
“I certainly do appreciate this very much, and as you tell [Anne’s] story, it brought to mind the different layers that are woven into that story, and the layers that you see in the rock of Natural Bridge sort of depict that,” said Jones. .
“It’s not just historical layers, there are layers that are being laid down still today. None of this would be possible if it wasn’t for the collective nature of everyone in Rockbridge County. I know they love their bridge, and we do, too, and it’s a blessing to be here.”
