The Festival of Gardens: A Pathway to Inspiration
by Regina Monteith, Master Gardener, former Columbia Green board members
A perennial sign of Spring in Columbia, Columbia Green’s 32nd Festival of Gardens marks the beginning of the growing, blooming, and touring garden season in Columbia. This year’s tour will explore gardens in the King’s Grant neighborhood on April 26 and 27, 2025. We will visit these gardens to admire, but also to learn. We will see unique landscape solutions, imaginative plantings and combinations of plants, and stunning garden art.
These tours of gardens will show us real life challenges that many gardeners face and many of the solutions that resolve those challenges. For soil fertility, get a soil sample analysis, and recycle kitchen and garden waste into compost to enrich the soil. For water, install a drip irrigation system to send water directly to the roots of plants and use a rain barrel to collect rainwater to use on garden beds. For questions of sun or shade, choose the right plant for the right spot, with shade plants for shade and sun plants in sunny locations. As important is gardening like a local, using native plants that thrive in our ecosystem and support wildlife. Pollinator-friendly plants, bird feeders, bee and bird houses, and bird baths provide the essentials of food and shelter and ensure a garden full of bees, dragonflies, birds, and other critters. Sometimes other critters are not welcome. Japanese beetles will decimate rose bushes. Pluck them off by hand rather than resort to a whole battery of insecticides.
Visiting gardens will remind us of the simple steps that we can take to improve our own gardens. Columbia Green’s tours are opportunities to see gardens in bloom with trees and perennials that work in our USDA zone. What a learning experience the tours are, especially for newcomers to Columbia, people who have moved here from the northeast or the northwest or the southwest. None of their tried and true plantings will work here! Columbia Green’s tours showcase gardens with plantings that work especially well here. They are inspirational to both seasoned gardeners and novices: some gardens are spectacular, high-end professional installations, while others are equally spectacular gardens installed by dig-in-the dirt, oops! soil, homeowners.
In addition to the usual challenges, King’s Grant gardeners face the challenge of deer because of their proximity to Fort Jackson. On my way to visit a friend in King’s Grant, I was astounded to see a herd of a dozen deer on the side of the road in someone’s garden. For newcomers to the neighborhood, there are only four solutions. First, move. Although this is a practical solution, it has not been recommended by Clemson’s Home and Garden Information Center. Second, erect a deer-proof fence, either a tall wooden privacy fence or a two-tiered fencing system. Both have aesthetic drawbacks. Third, spray plants with a deer repellent. Most are not waterproof and must be reapplied after every rain. Finally, plant deer-resistant plants. Forget about hostas: they are a deer’s salad bar. No Asiatic lilies or daylilies: that’s dessert, especially when they are fully in bloom and you are just enjoying them! Use the Carolina Yard Plant Database to find deer-resistant plants for Columbia. Attend the lecture by Tom Bruce of Carolina Daylilies on Deer Resistant Gardening on Sunday, April 27, 3 pm to learn how it IS possible to garden with hostas and daylilies in a deer resistant garden!
Well beyond visiting gardens to learn how other gardeners tackle challenges, I particularly appreciate defining moments in a garden. As a Richland County Master Gardener, I have been a docent at the Festival of Gardens for the last 10 years or so. In addition, I regularly go to England, Ireland, and Scotland for garden tours. It is the takeaway at individual gardens that inspires me when I think about my own garden.
In 2021, Toni Hubbell’s garden was featured in the Festival of Gardens in Spring Valley. Toni has large front and back gardens with many trees: tulip poplar, magnolia, both Japanese and native red maples, and pistache, as well as many rooms: several shade gardens, the rose garden, a vegetable garden. Before she even began planting, she had pathways of flagstone, grass, pea gravel, moss, and even mulch laid in the garden. She defined intersections at axes with antique millstones. When I tamed a wild area, I followed Toni’s example with a path of flagstones, circling from one end to the other. Flagstone paths are expensive, but paths of fallen leaves edged by hellebores are free, and those of mulch are cheap.
Much as my pathways were influenced by Toni’s, an element in her garden mirrors another at one of the great gardens in England. Toni and her late husband Jeffrey were very different gardeners. Toni put her plants in the ground in well-defined and designed beds. Jeffrey put his plants in containers in random assortments. Inspiration for a compromise came from Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter, one of England’s most famous gardens. Lloyd packed plants together in his iconic garden, especially tropical plants in flamboyant colors that would rarely grow in that climate. He covered the steps and the entry to his house with a random mosaic of potted plants, the exuberance of the whole outshining any particular plant. Using that inspiration, Toni and Jeffrey created “Little Dixter,” homage to Great Dixter, on the side of the house and saved their marriage!
“Little Dixter”
Another inspirational and iconic garden is the White Garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, England, planted by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicholson. Entered by an archway of white roses, this enclosed garden features white flowers with foils of gray foliage planted within neat hedges of boxwood. The striking combination of white, gray, and green inspired me to add many white plantings to my garden. Unlike Sissinghurst, where white flowers are confined to the White Garden, white flowers in my garden pop up everywhere. The gardening year begins in January with the white flowers of Edgeworthia, Tea Olive, and winter honeysuckle, ‘Breath of Spring,’ Lonicera fragrantissima, long a staple in my hundred-year-old garden, but now on the invasive species list. White pearl bush lines my driveway. The first time I saw it flowering, I thought I was in fairyland. Flowering now are white hellebores, the new upright ‘Ice n Roses’ variety, white iris, white hyacinths, white spirea, and white mountain laurel, Pieris japonica. Soon to bloom are white George Tabor azaleas. Many white ‘Limelight’ and ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas will follow. White magnolia blossoms will bring a fragrant scent to the garden. Summer blooms include daisies, but most are more vibrantly colored, red hibiscus, pink coneflowers, pink and blue salvias, and yellow coreopsis to attract bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators. Late summer and fall bring white anemones and towering white Formosa lilies, the flowers followed by paper seed heads, filled with hundreds of seeds that winds disperse. Next year, Formosa lilies will pop up all over your garden. The year ends with white camellia sasanquas, the smaller camellia. Favorite holiday flowers include forced paperwhites and white amaryllis, both of which can be planted in the garden for springtime blooms the following year. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson had their enclosed White Garden that bloomed mainly in the summer, but I have my own white garden with flowers that bloom all year long!
Sissinghurst (left) & Regina’s garden (right)
All this thanks to Columbia Green and to garden tour organizers. They present gardens to enthusiastic visitors, enlarging the scope of possibilities, inspiring the pathways to beauty, and modeling achievable results. See you at the Festival of Gardens in King’s Grant, April 26 and 27. You are sure to learn so much, especially about deer-proofing your garden!
Regina Monteith
Former Columbia Green Board of Directors member
Project Director, Carolina Yard at the Cottage
Richland County Master Gardener Association
