Typescript essay on Charleston gardens, page VI: Magnolia and the Adger-Smythe garden

VI

…spanned by the white-arched bridge. The background of this garden is formed by sombre gray moss-wreathed cypress and live oaks. This garden as everyone knows was started by Mr. Drayton, about eighty-five years ago. Mr. Drayton had been recommended by his doctor to lead an outdoor life owing to failing health, and this is the result. Needless to say he lived to a good old age, having bequeathed this legacy of living beauty to his descendants. Surely

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases it will never Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower of quiet for us.”

But there are many bowers of quiet for us in the city of Charleston itself. Behind the fine iron-wrought gates of the old Adger-Smythe house of Legare Street lies a lovely garden with green terraced lawn, formal walks, etc. In the spring Pansies, Sweetpeas and Roses of every variety abound here, but its growing glory is the marvelous wisteria vine, which festoons the arches and columns of the beautiful verandas that extend along three stories of the south side of the house.

It is a curious characteristic of Charleston that all of its lovely gardens are fenced about by high brick walls, the entrances of which, such as the Simonton Gateway, are most impressive and dignified — almost feudal one might say — till one almost wonders why our colonist ancestors neglected the moat and the drawbridge, in their conservative times.

Surely one might be pardoned for thinking that these same high brick walls, with their classic entrances conceal some lemon-haired Maeterlinckian fairy princess, who leads an