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How the Garden Club of Charleston has been beautifying the city for the past 100 years

How the Garden Club of Charleston has been beautifying the city for the past 100 years
March 2022
WRITER: 

Learn the projects the Garden Club of Charleston has helped plant



The Garden Club of Charleston maintains the gardens at the Heyward-Washington House.

While Holy City gardens are renewed each growing season, their roots run deep, right into the heart and psyche of the city. The same can be said of the Garden Club of Charleston, which commences its centennial celebration this month.

In the Charleston Renaissance era, with the arts and a preservation movement bursting into bloom, civic-minded women gathered for “promoting interest in gardening in order to beautify the…city and spreading information as to successful methods employed in this vicinity,” according to news reports in 1922.

The Temple Gate House of the Joseph Manigault House garden during an event to celebrate the restoration of the steps on the historic home’s north facade in the 1980s.

The first project focused on the Charleston Library Society, later part of the Gateway Walk the club created in 1930 with designs by landscape architect Loutrel Briggs. The club was federated two years later, and in 1933, prompted the city council to make Charleston a bird sanctuary. Gifts of benches to Battery Park came in 1966, and the club helped restore the Temple Gate House of the Joseph Manigault garden in 1983. Many have felt the effects of the Healing Garden at MUSC, begun by the club in 1994 with the department of psychiatry. And some 15 years later, the members raised funds for a garden for children with disabilities at Pattison’s Academy.

Today, the organization maintains the gardens of the Joseph Manigault and Heyward-Washington House sites, the Legare Waring House, and the Confederate Home on Broad Street, as well as the Gateway Walk and the Philip Simmons Garden at Anson and Menotti streets.

A look at The Temple Gate House of the Joseph Manigault House garden more recently.

The club also enriches the local cultural landscape, with scholarships, education programs, and respite for Alzheimer patients in day care.

The centennial kicks off, fittingly, in the garden of the Gibbes Museum of Art in March, followed by a plant sale in April, and the true founding anniversary in May.

 

100th Anniversary House & Garden Tour Celebration
March 24-26, 2022

Join the Garden Club of Charleston for a centennial celebration on Thursday, March 24th in the Lenhardt Garden at the Gibbes Museum of ArtThen, on Friday, March 25th and Saturday, March 26th, tour private houses and gardens in historic downtown Charleston. Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St. Thursday, 5:30–7:30pm; Friday & Saturday 1-5pm. $60. (843)722-2706, www.thegardenclubofcharleston.org