Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures

As one preeminent Charleston tour guide so elegantly states it, "Charleston is a garden growing between two rivers." Join any walking tour through the historic city and you'll soon discover that it is literally filled with magnificent gardens. The trick is knowing where to look.

These small private gardens, the treasures hidden behind decorative wrought iron gates and stone fences, have a special allure to the garden aficionado because they are steeped in the history and culture of the city.

So important is its history that many believe Charleston served as a botanical gateway between Europe and the New World at the hand of French naturalist André Michaux during the late 18th century. Many of the plant species we now consider "native" may have been brought to the area by Michaux and his son, François.

Today, many of Charleston's small, private gardens are undergoing renovations based on their original designs. Of particular interest are those designed by the preeminent landscape architect Loutrel W. Briggs, a New Yorker who helped define the area's 20th century garden style.

But those who love gardens in all their splendor cannot pass up an opportunity to visit the plantation gardens that lie along the waterways leading to Charleston. One remarkable historic treasure can be found at Middleton Place, America's oldest landscaped gardens. The plantation offers 65 acres of terraces, shadowy alleys, ornamental ponds and garden rooms laid out with precise symmetry and balance, making it the most unique and grand garden of its time. Today, it represents one of the Lowcountry's most spectacular expressions of the 18th century ideal—the triumphant marriage between man and nature.

Magnolia Plantation and its Gardens also hosts a number of spectacular horticultural treasures. They include the Barbados Tropical Garden, Horticultural Maze and Biblical Garden. The Audubon Swamp Garden at Magnolia Plantation has been hailed as America's newest and most unique major garden and wildlife preserve. Its eerie beauty is home to scores of water loving creatures. This wild and otherwise inaccessible area is traversed by boardwalks, dikes and bridges to put the visitor in eye to eye contact with its inhabitants. Its natural horticultural beauty has been enhanced by hundreds of species of colorful, year round blooming plants, both local and exotic, all planted with the taste that has made the 320 year old historic garden of Magnolia Plantation world famous.

Anyone interested in learning more about Charleston's gardens is invited to pick up a copy of Gardens of Historic Charleston by James R. Cothran, or The Charleston Gardener by Louisa Pringle Cameron.

The Name of the Rose

What is in a name?
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
- From Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The sweet smell of roses sweeps over Charleston's Hampton Park. Sometimes the aroma brings "candy" or even "sweetpeas" to mind, while at other times the fragrance seems more spicy and intense. But the smell is always that of roses. In fact, to walk the entire circle around the century-old park is to follow a trail of roses - all named Noisette.

Hampton Park, located on the tip of the peninsular city near The Citadel, is home to dozens of varieties of Noisette roses recently brought together as part of the Noisette Study Garden. But why the Noisettes belong here in the heart of Charleston and are worthy of study by international rosarians is a story that dates back to the early 1800s.

As is often the case in South Carolina, legend and facts are often mistaken for one and the same. So the exact transition of events in the development of the Noisette rose is still fuel for heated conversation among Lowcountry gardeners. But the most accepted account features one John Champneys in a starring role.

Sometime after the turn of the 19th century, a local rice farmer named John Champneys received an old blush china (Rosa chinensis) from his friend and neighbor, Philippe Noisette. Feeling adventurous, Champneys crossed his China stud with what is believed to be a musk rose (Rosa moschata.) The marriage of the two resulted in Champneys' pink cluster, the first major contribution to the rose family by an American grower. Returning the favor, as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette.

Noisette had come to Charleston from France, via Haiti, in the early 1800s to become the superintendent of the South Carolina Medical Society's Botanical Garden. A distinguished horticulturist, Noisette sowed the seeds of his gift, developing blush Noisette, which he promptly sent to his brother Louis, a nurseryman in Paris. Champneys' pink cluster, blush Noisette, and the many seedlings raised from them established this new class of roses named Noisette. These flowers spread all over the southeastern United States and parts of Europe like wildfire. But the story doesn't end there.

Over 150 years later, Charlestonian Ruth Knopf bent to examine a simple flower on a bush. Realizing it was a single-petaled rose, she set out to find one for her own garden. The search for the single-petaled rose led to the astonishing discovery of numerous varieties of Noisettes, all of which found a spot in her garden. Easy to raise compared to tea roses, the large bushy Noisettes grow in clusters that often number 50 or more rosehips. The flowers vary in size, but are mostly about an inch or two in diameter, and depending on the variety, bloom in an array of shades, from white to pink to yellow. Upon learning that Charleston was their birthplace, Knopf's interest in Noisettes quickly turned to passion.

For a list of must-see plantation tours and contact info, please click here.

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