In 1948 the estate where Evans had worked for decades changed hands and its grounds were opened to the public as the Airlie Gardens. Evans was hired to collect admission fees at the front gate. For more than twenty years, seven days a week, rain or shine she sat at the entrance reading, praying, and making drawings that she shared with the garden visitors. With few people at the garden except during the annual Azalea Festival, Evans had ample time to walk the grounds "to talk with God," as she put it. There she would have seen fountains topped by cherubs and maidens, busts of Greek gods, doric columns, ivy-covered urns bursting with potted arrangements, statuary, gates, arbors, and the domed colonnaded structure known to local residents as the Temple of Love. Evans had included botanical imagery in earlier work, but daily proximity to the grounds inspired her to intensify her color, expand her repertoire of images, and shift her focus from single floral or insect forms to all-over compositions exploding with radiant blooms that suggest a world alive with divine presence.
