The Secret Gardens of Charleston

Year-round, people come from all over the world to walk Charleston’s old streets and admire the fastidiously preserved architecture. The oldest residences were built by planters in the 1700s and 1800s as their in-town homes and by the merchants and others who shared in the wealth of the colony’s rice (and, later, cotton) trade.

In size, design and decoration, each home announced its owner’s wealth and status. They still do. Some sprawl beyond lavish lawns and gardens; many are built close together on surprisingly small lots with gardens behind. But all convey good taste, authenticity and refinement--and aristocratic aloofness.

From the sidewalk, admirers can only imagine what lies behind the forbidding front doors. Once a year, a lucky few hundred find out.

Every spring, doors and garden gates open to visitors during the Historic Charleston Foundation’s Festival of Houses and Gardens (this year, daily March 15 through April 14). A different neighborhood is featured each week, and 10 properties a day participate. You reserve tickets in advance ($40 a day) by credit card, and when you pick up your ticket, you get a list and map that shows which houses or gardens are open.

Last spring I gave myself a week in Charleston to visit its public gardens during their showiest season. While doing online research, I learned about the home tours and planned my days around them.

On my way to Charleston, I reacquainted myself with Emily Whaley, whose garden on Church Street is said to have been the most visited private garden in America.

“You really don’t get the feel of a place unless you can get into a house or a garden,” she wrote in “Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden,” a charming memoir published in 1997, a year or so before she died. “If you travel yourself you realize this.”

For an out-of-towner with only one card to play, I had exceptional luck: Mrs. Whaley’s garden was open on a day I had a ticket.

Measuring just 30 by 110 feet, the garden had a variety of focal points along its twining paths. These included a tiny pond, a grouping of herbs and another of flowers for picking. Of great interest was its inclusion of borrowed landscaping: The walls of the neighbor’s carriage house and the view of a church steeple were incorporated in the design. A hidden path at the very end led behind a high hedge of boxwood to a private bower furnished with a chair and a little statue of a fox.

I moved on to the seven or eight other gardens that were open that afternoon. Charleston’s mild winters stimulate early spring, and last April everything seemed to be in the peak of bloom: dogwoods, azaleas, tulips, roses, pansies, hydrangeas, oleanders, day lilies.

Although 500 tickets a day are sold, no more than 20 ticket-holders (and a guide) are likely to be at any given spot at once, and at times I felt almost alone. As I strolled lazily, my imagination created several scenarios. I could see the garden parties, the friends sharing intimacies, the solitary escapees from everyday stresses. Mrs. Whaley was right: These gardens are places “to invite your soul for a visit.”

My house-tour afternoons brought me to both ends of the spectrum in Charleston’s story of architectural conservation, which began in the 1920s.

The city was heavily damaged during the Civil War--Ft. Sumter still stands in the harbor--and just as economic recovery seemed to be getting underway, in 1886 it was devastated again, this time by an earthquake. Historians say this setback spared the city the “progress”--and architectural excesses--of the Victorian era. When the auto age brought the need for street widening, citizens prevailed to keep the 26-block downtown historic core in all its antebellum splendor.

Restoration and preservation are never-ending twin civic duties here. One afternoon’s ticket took me to Anson Street, a charming uptown neighborhood with a concentration of early 19th century homes. By the 1960s, Anson Street was close to becoming a slum. The Historic Charleston Foundation rescued about 60 houses, and today Anson is thoroughly gentrified.

Mansions aside, most of the historic district’s homes are known as single houses, or “30-foot-wides”: Each is only one large room wide with two rooms on each floor, rising two or three floors. The front doors face the street, while long porches, or piazzas, face south or west and open the first and sometimes second stories to gardens.

Most of the Anson Street homes were built in the early 1840s, and through loving restoration show off exquisite woodwork and moldings, original floors of local heart pine, and marble fireplaces in nearly every room. Some have splendid pocket doors between drawing room and parlor; some have crystal chandeliers anchored in sculpted plaster medallions. And in every room, classic Charleston style: period antiques, sisal rugs, collections of fine regional art and silver, and personal furnishings with respectable pedigrees. In one of them, elaborate moldings in the living room outlined windowsills adorned with apothecary bottles. Carriage lamps illuminated by candles adorned the front door of another.

(I have not listed addresses here because the houses on the tour differ each year. Note, too, that home interiors may not be photographed.)

But it’s not only furnishings that bring past and present together. All of the antebellum homes were built by slaves, many of whom became masters at fine crafts such as woodworking and cabinetmaking. Today the legacy of those craftsmen lives on in the Historic Charleston Foundation programs that train young people in these highly marketable renovation skills.

Another tour brought me to the East Battery, the tip of the peninsula the city occupies. Facing open water where two rivers merge into the Atlantic, this has always been prime residential property.

Here, too, I was lucky: The Robert William Roper House, rarely open to these tours, was on my list that day.

The owner, a corporate czar, has put his considerable wealth and good taste into this showcase of Greek Revival architecture. It is nothing short of exquisite. Ionic columns frame the piazza that faces the Cooper River and, in the distance, Ft. Sumter.

Built in 1838, the house has huge rooms with doors 14 feet high, large-pane floor-to-ceiling windows, opulent window treat ments and heavily gilded and carved Neoclassical and Empire furniture from the 1800s.

I managed to walk through 10 houses that day.

On Zig Zag Alley, a door adorned with a pineapple knocker opened onto a living and dining room done in English antiques; an upstairs bedroom held a four-poster carved in a rice motif.

In a mansion built in 1856 by cotton planter-brokers, each room is constructed of a different wood. The library is paneled in English oak, for instance, and a bedroom is done in mahogany. The place also is valued for its intricate carving details and original hardware.

Another East Battery home evokes faraway trade with its collection of keepsakes a forebear brought home from Bali and Sumatra. Other rooms held signed Tiffany lamps.

I filled the rest of my week in Charleston with visits to gardens and historic homes that are usually open to the public.

One blustery afternoon I drove my rental car to Boone Hall, called “America’s most photographed plantation” because of its half-mile avenue of moss-draped oaks, just like the one that led to Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara. Geometric gardens grace the front in spring with tulips, pansies, poppies, johnny-jump-ups and forget-me-nots. The house, a private residence, is a 1935 reconstruction, but original slave cabins still stand on the property and, with the garden, are open to visitors. (It’s on South Carolina 17 near Mt. Pleasant, about six miles northeast of Charleston.)

Another day, I drove northwest of the city, about 10 miles out, on South Carolina Scenic Highway 61. There I found Middleton Place, with America’s oldest landscaped garden, first laid out in 1741. It boasts formal lawns and reflecting pools, beds of daffodils and tulips, China and tea roses and a profusion of ancient azaleas.

My favorite garden of all was Magnolia Plantation, near Middleton Place. First opened to the public in the late 1860s, Magnolia is less formal than Middleton, with a variety of styles. Pathways lined with azaleas curve down to and along the Ashley River. The most amazing feature was the swamp garden, where blackwater cypress and tupelo trees thrive in water painted green from the tiny plants that grow on the surface.

That night, to keep the otherworldly feeling alive, I dined in McCrady’s Tavern, just off the Battery. Said to have hosted George Washington in 1793 for a few ales, it’s now handsomely modern, with a long, sleek bar and a contemporary Southern menu. I swooned over the crab salad appetizer and roasted Chilean sea bass with lobster bisque sauce and leeks. I left feeling like a cosmopolitan Southern lady. And if I’d seen Rhett Butler on the way home, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

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GUIDEBOOK

Blooming in Charleston

Getting there: Delta, United, Continental, Northwest, TWA and US Airways serve Charleston from Los Angeles with one change of planes. Restricted round-trip fares in March begin at $438.

Garden touring: Historic Charleston Foundation, P.O. Box 1120, Charleston, SC 29402; telephone (843) 722-3405, fax (843) 577-2067. Reserve tickets and get information about this year’s tour, March 15-April 14, at Internet https://www.historiccharleston.org.

Where to stay: The Vendue Inn, 19 Vendue Range, Charleston, SC 29401; tel. (800) 845-7900 or (843) 577-7970, https://www.charlestonvendueinn.com, is a complex of old warehouses off Waterfront Park downtown, transformed into charming rooms with 18th century decor. Room rates, which include a full buffet breakfast, range from $160 to $305.

I had tried to get a room at the Lodge Alley Inn, 195 E. Bay St., Charleston, SC 29401; tel. (800) 845-1004, or (843) 722-1611, https://www.lodgealleyinn.com, but it was booked when I called months in advance. This collection of old buildings centered on a landscaped courtyard offers 95 units of various sizes, each looking like a local residence. Rates range from $198 to $350.

For a different kind of authentic atmosphere, the Embassy Suites-Historic Charleston is in the original (1822) Citadel military school at 337 Meeting St. Weekday rates in March start at $169; full breakfast is included. Tel. (843) 723-6900 or (800) 362-2779, https://www.embassysuites.com.

Where to eat: Carolina’s, 10 Exchange St., local tel. 724-3800, is a popular downtown meeting place.

McCrady’s Tavern, 2 Unity Alley, tel. 577-0025, is a sophisticated wonder secreted in an alley off East Bay Street.

For more information: South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism, P.O. Box 71, Columbia, SC 29202; tel. (803) 734-1700, https://www.travelsc.com.

Another good Web site on Charleston, with listings for accommodations, attractions and restaurants, is https://www.insiders.com/charleston-sc.