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Showing posts from April, 2011

Southern Gardens

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Southern Iris Sir Walter Scott wrote that "Nothing is more a child of art than a garden."  I couldn't agree more.  I recently visited a couple of gardens of the southern variety in South Carolina -- one with a bit of southern history attached to it and the other a part of the legacy left to us by the Huntington family. The first, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens , is outside of Charleston.  It's been in the Drayton family since 1679.  The gardens are the creation of John Drayton who returned to Magnolia in the early 1800s and set out to create romantic gardens to make his wife -- born and bred in the north -- feel at home.  They are a wonderful setting for a plantation house that was reconstructed after the civil war.  Somewhere on the estate, the current matriarch of the Drayton family is still in residence.  I can imagine her sitting in a rocking chair on the wide porch of smaller version of the big house (which itself is a much smaller shadow of the origina