We are here in Charleston still enjoying being tourists while we wait for the next serious weather to pass. A strong cold front approaches and is due to pass through the area this afternoon with strong winds, rain, thunderstorms, and such. It looks like we’ll be headed out of here on Monday.

New Neighbors

In addition to the Gunilla, The Spanish tall ship JC Elcano, the third largest in the world, is anchored out in the harbor doing as we are and waiting for weather to pass before continuing North.

Charleston Garden Tour Review

The local historical society runs a huge number of tours of this city. We were looking forward to the tour of the downtown gardens. It was expensive, but it seemed like a great way to spend a beautiful day. Our suggestion is to skip the garden tours, and just have a nice walk and admire the architecture.

It is organized as a walking tour in the historical district of eight private gardens. It is well run, and very organized with lots of helpful volunteers who can answer architectural, gardening, and historical questions. Unfortunately, the gardens are really not worth the trouble.

Each of the gardens is beautifully maintained, to be sure. They are just amazingly, boringly, the same. Karen and I can be kind of horticultural snobs, so we might have had higher expectations than many. Many of the gardens on the tour were small spaces, so the design options were limited, but a tour of 8 of the best gardens in the city really should show more creativity than we saw. Especially in a small space, carefully chosen and creatively used plants can standout. Unfortunately, each garden used the same very limited palette of plant varieties. In this climate there is no excuse for this. Almost ANYTHING will grow here.

My take-away was that none of the homeowners were actually gardeners. They hired a “garden designer” who gave them something that was pretty to look at, but dull and unimaginative to anyone who actually loved plants.