Thai Exhibition Garden

SITE EVALUATION AND PLANNING
2005 was the inaugural year of the Charleston Garden Festival at Middleton Place Plantation. As a fledgling entrepreneur and young Charleston Horticultural Society Board Member, I was eager to participate.

I enlisted Chip Chesnutt of Other Side of the River to be my co-conspirator and we blindly entered the world of display gardening.

In the spring of 2005, we selected our site- a vast 60x80 foot green space with a view of the Ashley River. If you've ever done a display garden, you know this is an enormous space to fill. We simply didn't know any better.
Over the summer, we drew and submitted plans to the CGF powers-that-be, ambitiously deciding to build a tea house and create meandering paths into several well-designed rooms. Mixing hardy Lowcountry plants like Oleander and Viburnum with exotic orchids, gingers, bananas and palms, we designed a tropical garden that would thrive in the Southern landscape.

We bought a book on how to build bamboo fences. Chip and his crew spent the summer in a forest with machetes, harvesting invasive bamboo. The canes were held together with intricately woven black rope, as seen below:SET-UP
Set-up began on a Monday and we had four days to complete our garden. Plants were delivered on loan from local wholesale nurseries. A disturbingly heavy Buddha statue was borrowed from Hyam's Garden Center. Twenty-foot tall bamboo was cut from the forest and hauled to the site. We were overwhelmed to say the least!

I coordinated the layout of the site, with a crew of Americorps volunteers and Middleton Place Plantation employees.
Because the plants stayed in their pots, we had to water them every day to keep them from drying out:
Pine straw was artfully arranged around the bases of the plants to give the appearance that they were actually planted in the landscape:
Chip and his crew built a surprisingly sturdy tea house with a bamboo thatch roof (there was no plan and he had never constructed anything before....though he told me over and over that it was "to code"). He surrounded the boards with bamboo:
Then, Chip and his crew took the cut timber bamboo and created a "forest" around the perimeter. They did this by driving a piece of rebar 2-feet into the ground, removing the rebar and inserting a piece of bamboo. They did this over and over until the desired affect was achieved. It was really ingenious....I wish I had picture of the process. You can see the bamboo in this image:COMPLETED
Somehow, it all came together. I lost 8 pounds that week and my feet were so swollen that I had to soak them in Epsom Salts before the garden party. But it was worth it.

On Monday, we dismantled the garden and returned the plants, stone and borrowed items. The pine straw was used on a landscape installation later that week and the fence became a screen in Chip's backyard.

I had about 10 meltdowns that week, but looking back, I'm glad we chose to tackle the entire 60x80' space. It was quite an experience.

The Re-Birth of Venus

I'm a summertime girl, but I think I'm ready for a change in the weather. It's going to feel so good once the humidity drops and the mornings are crisp again.

Cool fall weather reminds me of the Charleston Garden Festival which always took place in mid-October.

Other Side of the River's Chip Chesnutt and I designed and built three exhibition gardens for the Garden Festival. In 2006, we decided our garden would be an interpretation of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Made completely of plants and natural materials, this developed into a very challenging project.

First, let me say that trying to make a painting into a life-size display garden is difficult- particularly when the focus of the painting is a woman standing in a shell.

Once we had settled on this theme, I bought a mannequin off of eBay that was to be our Venus. This is certainly the most interesting purchase I have ever made.

A few days after I "won" the mannequin I selected, she arrived in the mail. I put her together, styled her in one of my more formal dresses, and let her live in my apartment for a few weeks until we were ready to work on her.

While her legs were in the right stance, her arms had to be changed to resemble the painting. So Chip sawed off her arms at the elbow and we re-attached them in the right position using fiberglass webbing (graciously donated by a local doctor). We performed this "operation" at night, adding to the weirdness:


Over the next few days, I covered her entire body with live sheet moss using spray glue:

Our site was located in the Octagonal Garden at Middleton Place. Notice that everyone else had already started setting up when our quadrant was still empty:

Jeff Jackson, owner of Lowcountry Roots , collaborated with us and built this amazing shell out of tabby. The "ocean" was created using different species of Junipers and Cedars. Slowly, the garden started to take shape.

As a final touch, I wove a lavender ribbon through her Spanish Moss hair. The mannequin suddenly transformed from the Swamp Thing into Venus.
I had serious doubts of about this project (and had stress-induced strep throat), but somehow, it all came together.

Island Retreat

This is a small garden on Sullivan's Island that I designed last year. Of all the designs I have done, I'm most pleased with this one.

In January, Chip Chesnutt of Other Side of the River (othersideoftheriver@gmail.com) began installation on this project. In the end, this became a collaboration between the two of us.

Chip and I have worked together on many landscapes and we make an effort to make sound ecological decisions. We purchased all of the plants from local growers, the hardscapes are permeable and we did not use plants that are known to be invasive.