styles contained in a typical district block achieves a very strong compositional harmony because virtually all houses adhere to the same rules of massing, scale, and cornice height setback and lot size. Since 1967, the architecture and the stories behind selected homes in the district have been shared publicly each September during the neighborhood association's annual Central Gardens Home and Garden Tour. The tour is usually attended by more than 2,000 people. Among the architects whose works are represented by homes in the district are Neander M. Woods, who "may have been Memphis' most inventive architect of the first quarter of the 20th century," Mahan & Broadwell, who designed many of the Tudor and Italian homes on South McLean near Central, Walk C. Jones Sr. and Max Furbinger, partners "from 1904 to 1935, the peak of Midtown's construction boom," J. Frazer Smith, whose own Peabody Avenue home reflected the same antebellum plantation design that inspired his history of Southern Architecture, White pillars: early life and architecture of the Lower Mississippi Valley country (1940) and Francis Gassner, whose Harbert Avenue home's design reflected the Modernist International Style of the mid-twentieth century. Gallery of homes in Central Gardens Historic preservation and annual home and garden tour Central Gardens is one of Memphis' three historic conservation zones. The designation means that a property owner seeking a building permit for exterior work must receive a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) from Memphis Landmarks Commission. Design Guidelines are available for all projects that require a COA. After the conclusion of the 34th annual Central Gardens Home & Garden Tour in 2010, Editor Chris Peck of The Commercial Appeal wrote that "if Memphis wants to get its groove back as one of America's most livable cities, those who dream of that day need to take the Central Gardens home tour when it rolls around next year." He noted that the "inner-city neighborhood offers an elegant, inspiring reminder of how urban decay, middle-class flight and mind-numbing architecture don't have to rule the day. Central Gardens dazzled last week's home-tour crowd with its leafy green, walkable and surprisingly diverse urban landscape. You couldn't help but envy the people who live there. It's beautiful, well-maintained and 100 years old." Arboretum status Central Gardens was designated as a level 3 arboretum by the state of Tennessee in 2008 and recertified in December 2019. One of just two in Tennessee, it is