Last Sunday, I visited Magnolia Gardens, just outside Charleston, South Carolina. In all these years, I'd somehow never been. I can't quite explain my absence, though certainly I remember those other visits and the various pleasures that filled my time: tennis lessons and dog walks and bike rides, coffee at the neck of the island and lunch overlooking the ocean at the end.
I'd just finished browsing Mac Griswold's excellent The Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners, Private Estates, and I'd paid particular attention to the gardens of the American South. In the aftermath of the Civil War, many old estates, from Virginia to Mississippi to Georgia, lay in ruin, or their owners had no money to keep them up. As it so happened, the ascendant "new money" (the industrialists of the northeast) enjoyed both mild winters and the implied family history that came with the ownership of an old Southern plantation. Those landowners who did hold onto their estates opened them up to tourists (also, presumably, northerners), who came to gape at the world that once was. Antebellum South Carolina had been one of the wealthiest areas of the country, and the Lowcountry plantations were some of the largest producers of rice in the world. After the war, Magnolia stayed in the Drayton family, but only by catering to tourists, who took cruises down the river from Charleston and arrived by the trainload by century's end.
Visiting former plantations can be an exercise in hokey Old South revisionism, although these days, most places at least gesture to the institution of slavery, usually by offering tours of the slave cabins. Slave labor built the wealth and, brick by brick, the great houses. And, of course, the gardens - where each shovelful of dirt, in the hot sweaty southern sun, was dug by men who could claim neither their surnames nor their offspring. I vaguely remember a former plantation located somewhere along the Ashley River that I once visited as a child. It had been built after the Civil War (but "the wood floors are authentic!" the brochure hastened to assure us) and featured a guide who probably hailed from Cleveland. She showed us the after-dinner smoking room, and asked us how we thought the gentleman (I have always hated the misnomer!) kept the ladies (I have always hated the diminutive!) out of that room. One red-faced man bellowed, "WELL, I suppose they LOCKED THE DOORS!" and she turned to him, thin-lipped, and trilled, "Well, no, they simply made the doors too narrow to fit the ladies' whalebone hoop skirts."
II.
Magnolia has plenty to appeal to those who want to tour either "the hospitable south" represented by the main house (an unfortunate Victorian pile) or the authentic antebellum South represented by the slave cabins. There is even a petting zoo for restless children who've had enough of tours. And then there are the gardens. They were begun by the Reverend John Drimké Drayton, who unexpectedly inherited the plantation upon his elder brother's death in a hunting accident, and who gardened in the hopes of curing his own ill health and his wife's homesickness. (He lived for another half-century after he started to garden; the impact of his efforts upon his wife is unknown.) He filled the grounds with imported azaleas and camellias in a loose, romantic style that contrasted with the stiff formality popular in the previous century.
This time of year, the camellias are what you come for: flowering white or crimson or, most often, baby pink, in bloom or bud or cast in circles on the ground. They smell like honeysuckle and I spent most of my afternoon with my nose buried in various flowers. The camellias will bloom from now through the early spring, just in time for the azaleas - another of Drayton's imports - which dominate Charleston in springtime. Scores of varieties are planted along winding paths in the woods, but they're also used as borders in long, formal allées and have been carved into a blooming maze.
III.
Past the slope where flat-bottomed ships heavy with goods used to ride the tides back and forth to Charleston, a walking trail leads out into the river. It is a raised berm, maybe six feet above the water's surface, that divides the river from the former rice fields, now given over to an avian sanctuary. We saw hundreds of birds, particularly small squawking ducks and cormorants posed elegantly on slanted boards. The first mention - it is not even a warning - of American alligators comes well after you've seen the first ten-foot beast sunning himself in the tepid November air. - "But they don't move very quickly when it's this cold out," we assured one another.
Out where the berm bent back around, the air was still, and the tinny sound of an unseen ice cream truck drifted from somewhere across the river. It must be hell out there in the summer - there'd be no place to hide from the mosquitos, the gnats, the no-see-ums. Sometimes a small metal motorboat would roar by, probably a shrimper or fisherman coming home.
For what it's worth, we were two of only eight people walking around the entire aviary. One excited Scotsman told us about the black snakes hiding in the trees, but we never did see any.
IV.
My favorite part of the gardens were the cypress trees, standing like a solemn, weird rebuke to the camellias nearby. Their roots reached elegantly into inky pools of water, or sprouted from the ground like miniature mountain ranges on some alien planet.
Magnolia Plantation and Gardens
3550 Ashley River Road
Charleston, SC 29414
P.S.
So far as I'm concerned, petting zoos are one of the primary reasons to have children. How could you eat a creature so beautiful? And I mean the turkey.
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