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Prologue [Color plates follow page 2]
- University of South Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Prologue MANY OF THE ESSAYS GATHERED HERE were published originally in the Charleston Mercury , a newspaper published twice a month; I have served as newspaper’s chief garden and travel correspondent since 2004. My husband, Fred LeClercq, and I have traveled frequently in Europe, with gardens and art as a major focus. These essays provide a roadmap for visiting and enjoying gardens. The focus is the discovery of gardens as a source of art, inspiration, and entertainment; each chapter will touch on garden history, design, and horticulture. My goal is to tempt and inspire the reader to get out into the magic of sun, sky, and garden enjoyment. My hope is to provide us with a garden microscope and a handful of rubrics for assessing the success of each garden in terms of aesthetics and efficacy. Enjoying a garden requires knowledge of each country’s unique national style. It also requires a set of rubrics against which a visitor can gage the effectiveness of a garden’s design and horticulture. The tips in these essays will provide a visitor the tools for deciphering the “language” of a garden. No garden is perfect. It is essential in assessing the effectiveness of a design and the robustness of the planting scheme to ask the right questions. Is this an “all at once” formal design that can be comprehended at a single glance? Is this a romantic landscape design with twists and unexpected delights? How has the gardener met adverse conditions of topography , wind, sun, and soil? What devices has the gardener used to meet these challenges ? What combinations of plants have been used to develop the horticultural scheme of the garden? Is the final result a garden with pleasing aesthetics in terms of design, color, and plant combinations? What standards are essential to create an architectonic design or floor plan for the garden? Is this a garden that entertains and delights with its sense of immediacy? The introductory essay, “Gardening as Art and Entertainment,” was written by my mother, the late Emily Whaley. Mother shared her wonderful garden at 58 Church Street in Charleston with visitors from all over the world. Her garden gate was always open. She developed a unique palette for creating a garden rich in art and entertainment. She generously shared some of these insights in her book, Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden. Planting her garden with an artist’s perception for color and the shapes of plants, she especially loved the combination of blue and pink. In the spring there were blue pansies, blue verbena, pink tulips, and pink camellias. In fall there were blue hydrangeas and pink roses. Mother planted for depth, bringing color up to eye level. She enjoyed the contrast of her smooth and 2 Prologue velvety green lawn with the lush flowering of her borders. She delighted in focal points that caught the eye or even surprised; she used her garden pool, and the lovely goose girl that adorned it, as one of those eye-catching spots. It also served to bring flocks of birds into her garden. Mother enjoyed entertaining in her garden. She could be found there in the mornings in her bathrobe, talking to her plants and enjoying a hot cup of coffee. In the afternoon she would sit on her terrace with her Jack Russell terrier, Rosie, talking with friends and visitors and sipping an ice and vodka. Her garden was a place of quiet and repose, away from the planned regime of ordinary life. These beliefs and pointers were shared with her admirers in lectures that the two of us delivered between 1996 until her death in 1998. Emily Whaley’s rubrics provide a useful guide for critiquing and admiring gardens . Today the garden is owned by my sister Marty Whaley Cornwell, who uses her artist’s touch to change and develop an exciting new palette for the garden at 58 Church St. As Marty said to me recently: “My hope is that the garden at 58 Church Street will continue to be an inspiration to those who seek solace in the midst of beauty and who wish to create a garden of their own, and that the garden will always be a place where I can be inspired, where my soul can catch up with my body and find sure footing. As plants grow out of scale or die, I want to explore replacing them with ones that will thrive on their own and provide unique...