"Walking into a Perfume Bottle" for October VIE

“A ballroom needs structure to contain its empty party space, and a garden ballroom is no different. Four ‘walls’ were a way of containing the area but open to the sky where anything seemed possible: a place for sitting still or dancing among a crowd. One wall was an avenue of thirteen twenty-foot holly trees, and another was a line of five black cement pillars with gigantic pots of pink sasanqua trees shaped like umbrellas. (This was the view from the kitchen table.) Two clipped hedges formed the north and south walls. Four pots of standard orange trees stood in the corners. Ballrooms look grand with a piece of art, so we installed a sculpture — a seven-foot-long hippopotamus bench made of Pennsylvania granite….”

Suzanne writes of her time spent living in the Elizabeth Barnwell Gough house (c. 1780) in Beaufort SC, where she restored the gardens to their original glory with her signature nod to modern. In case any readers are like us — faced with fallen trees and perhaps a future blank slate in your backyard, desperately needing the ultimate yard inspiration after Hurricane Dorian — read the rest of this article in the October issue of VIE Magazine HERE!