A Diva's Vacation - Part 6

On our second day at Brookgreen Gardens we took a lovely meandering walk through the sculpture garden and took one of the plantation explorer tours. 

Flocks of wild turkeys wander the grounds and we saw several throughout the day.  And here's something I learned from my uncle, the family hunter.  In the wild male turkeys flock with other males and female turkeys flock with other females, they don't mingle at all and tend to give each other a rather wide birth until mating season.

My aunt snapping a pic of one of Anna's sculptures.  

The gardens are decorated seasonally, and we happened to visit as they were transitioning between fall and Christmas, so some of the fall decorations were still in place.  Including this gigantic cornucopia.

And if you've read some of the same books I've read you'll understand what I mean when I say that the first thought that ran through my head when I saw this was: "May the odds be ever in your favor."
 

Two lovely bronze peacocks stand as sentries at the entrance to the sculpture gardens.

And they are on loan from the private collection of Tia...which is a hilarious coincidence because Tia is the online persona that my cousin uses.  And we didn't even know she collected bronzes.

"Diana" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
...which originally stood atop Madison Square Garden

"Diana" by Gelb Derjinsky

"Diana" by Paul Manships

There are several groves of live oaks throughout the gardens

...which just drip with Spanish moss.

"Forest Idyl" by Albin Polasek

The waterlilies in the irrigation fountain were still in bloom.

The entrance to the children's garden.

My uncle made a new friend.

See the strings of LED Christmas lights wound around the tree?

Camellias were in bloom all over the garden.

Its a little hard to see in this picture, but this is part of the children's garden and there were stings of twinkling Christmas lights hanging down from the trees.

"The Tortoise Train" by W. Stanley Proctor

"Sunflowers" by Charles Parks

"Diana of the Chase" by Anna Hyatt Huntington

A Gullah Bottle Tree at the Lowcountry Center

The bottle tree is one of the oldest traditions practiced by the Gullah-Geechee people.  The legend is believed to go back to the ninth century to Congo, West Africa where hand-blown glass was hung on huts and trees for protection against evil. According to legend, good spirits cannot resist crawling into the bottles on the trees to see what is inside. When the sun comes up, their good powers become stronger. The elders used to place an assortment of bottles on real trees near the entrance to their homes so that all who entered or departed were blessed and protected. Today, most people simply use bottle trees to decorate their yards and gardens.

The Allston/Alston Family Cemetery

The Oaks Plantation, now part of Brookgreen Gardens, was owned by the Allston/Alston family from the 1730s through the early 1900s and was home to South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston and his wife Theodosia Burr Alston, the daughter of Aaron Burr who was Vice-President of the United States. Her marriage in 1801 was followed by a series of tragedies that ended with Theodosia's disappearance at sea in January of 1813.

The cemetery gate and repaired walls.

- HistoryDiva