The road to Middleton Place takes visitors on a memorable drive along The Ashley River Scenic Highway (State Highway 61) eight miles from Charleston. This is a very special and beautiful stretch of road. It’s an old and historic highway, running along the path of the Ashley River. For twenty miles, oak trees cover the road in a green and shady canopy. It is along this road that some of the most notable plantation homes and gardens of the South Carolina Lowcountry are located: Magnolia, Drayton Hall, and Middleton Place.
I have made trips to see the spectacular azalea and camellia gardens at Middleton Place since the late 1970s, but only during the past five years have I visited fairly often with my yearly membership. I wrote in my journal in July of 2005 about a visit there with my sister, niece, nephew. I had not been in many years. In 1982, I took a group of students to the plantation on a field trip and got to experience the place through the unleashed raucous energy of youth. We had a great time.
On the visit 20 years ago, my niece and nephew, who were in college and high school at the time, walked a path along with me and my sister, past huge live oak trees, around a reflecting pool, into secret gardens, and to the high ground overlooking the butterfly lakes. It was humid but with all the rain, everything was lush and verdant.
But now, more than ever, I am aware of the history of the enslaved African Americans who worked on the plantations of the Middleton family and created these beautiful gardens I admire so much today. The same is true for nearby Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.
One has an overwhelming since of stepping far back in time when in the midst of these gardens. Middleton Place is the oldest landscaped formal garden in America, laid out in 1741. The property itself was first settled in the late 17th century and was acquired by Henry Middleton through marriage in the year the gardens were laid out.
For 125 years, the property was the family seat of four successive generations of Middletons: Henry, who was President of the First Continental Congress; Arthur, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; a second Henry who was a governor of South Carolina, and William, who signed the Ordinance of Seccession, five years before the Civil War came to Middleton Place, wreaking destruction on the original home. The gardens were restored in the early 20th century. In the 1970s, Middleton Place was declarerd a National Historic Landmark.
Middleton Place in the Spring
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/4334sV4zK8
Middleton is a rare surviving example of an 18th-century “continental” (formal, European-influenced) garden in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
The gardens began around 1741, and are famous for their symmetry, axial views, terraces, and planned “surprises” in sweeping vistas.
A signature feature is the garden’s dramatic series of terraced lawns dropping toward the Ashley River—one of the most iconic prospects in American landscape history. The design also incorporated long, straight walks, formal planting areas, and water features including the famed “Butterfly Lakes.”
Middleton Place is celebrated for camellias—especially because of its association with some of the earliest camellias cultivated in an American garden. In 1786, French botanist André Michaux brought Camellia japonica to Middleton Place (often described as the first camellias planted in America). Middleton Place notes that one of the original plants survive. The garden’s camellias bloom when much else is dormant in the Lowcountry winter months. Imagine seeing such exquisite color and beauty in blooming shrubs in early January, as I experienced a few days ago. It is so peaceful out there that I always lose myself in the tranquility and beauty, taking numerous photographs which I present in self-published books and online, as in this essay.
Any truthful description of Middleton Place must include this: The grand earthworks—terraces, ditches, canals, lakes—were excavated and built through enslaved labor, including the garden’s major structural features. To its credit Middleton Place today explicitly interprets the site as the product of both the Middleton family and “the enslaved Africans and African Americans who lived and worked there.
According to some brief research I did today, …long-term research at Middleton has culminated in the exhibit “Beyond the Fields” (at Eliza’s House), documenting slavery in South Carolina and at Middleton Place, and listing over 2,800 people enslaved by the Middletons by name—a striking attempt to restore identity and historical reality to people long reduced to property in records. In other words: the gardens’ beauty is inseparable from the coerced skill and endurance of enslaved people who engineered, planted, maintained, and remade the landscape across generations.
According to the Middleton Gardens Website, One of the main house flankers—the South Flanker—was the least damaged and later became the primary surviving residential structure after repairs (and it endured later disaster, including the 1886 earthquake).
After the war, the property went through periods of reduced wealth and limited restoration; eventually, the gardens were revived and opened to the public in the early 20th century, becoming one of the country’s most important historic garden sites.
A online guided tour of the site includes this description and comments about the entire experience of the plantation and its gardens:
Middleton Place is a place of extraordinary beauty. But its deepest meaning is this: Beauty does not cancel suffering. Suffering does not erase beauty.The garden is real, and the labor that built it is real. So perhaps the best way to honor the place is not to romanticize it—but to see it whole. And in doing so, you become part of what Middleton Place now tries to do in its best historical interpretation: Not to preserve a fantasy. but to preserve truth.
Photos I took a few days ago will give you some idea of the beauty of the formal gardens.
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/1426geP9tn
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