Garden at George Mathews House

About

The owners are garden enthusiasts, and the husband designed the garden rooms surrounding the 1743 house to be compatible with the early Charleston architecture and southern climate. Greeting you is a small ‘Kingsville’ boxwood parterre with a Colonial-style fence on which climbing Iceberg roses and white mandevilla bloom. At the rear of this garden is an old Ligustrum which has been pruned to show its oriental derivation below which are two standard gardenias in planters. The driveway provides the entrance to the rear gardens and is planted with Wintergreen boxwood, single stem loquat trees, and Podocarpus. Edging the drive is a line of variegated Aztec grass interspersed with holly ferns. The next garden room is an early eighteenth-century style parterre of Kingsville and Wintergreen boxwood, variegated Asiatic jasmine and oregano globes in the center. The kitchen house is covered with climbing white Iceberg roses, an espaliered magnolia, and a potato vine and a cascading Lady Banks rose on the corners. As one steps up to the second level of the garden, one faces two small rooms—one with white foxgloves among strawberry begonias lining the walk to the rose- covered garden house, and the other an exotic garden of palms, Fatsia, papyrus, and hellebores. Through a Podocarpus hedge, shaped as a wall with entry posts and finals, one views the last garden room, with its brick and brown stucco walls as a backdrop for a shrub border of camellias, hollies, azaleas, hydrangeas, tea olives, and four white crepe myrtle standards surrounding a newly installed gravel garden. This sustainable garden contains anchor plantings of boxwood, pittosporum, and holly among succulents, agaves, and perennials in shades of gray, chartreuse, blue, purple and pink. Above the bench is a bower of Lady Banks roses. On either side are English urns filled with seasonal plantings. The garden was named one of the “World’s Most Beautiful Gardens in 2023” by Veranda magazine.

This garden is a part of the Saturday, May 31 Behind the Garden Gate - Charleston Open Day (Historic District). For more information and tickets about this event, please click here.