Fun at the Brookgreen Gardens Art Show: 6' 19

It had been a long time since we had been to an out of door art craft show., so were both excited to  visit the Brookgreen Gardens Annual Arts and Craft show.

Bruce fully enjoyed  the  chance to get out and see  all the creativity which this area produces.

As always, the gardens were beautiful.

There was color every direction  we looked.

 With plenty of places to rest under all the large heritage oaks in the gardens

2018_ Sisters Vacay: 6 '18

 So much to do and see with so little time to do it in

Friday was spent getting a tour of  Bruce and Cece's home,

 exploring Pawleys Island and Huntington Beach State Park beaches,

and, of course,

Having a beach front lunch at  the Litchfield Inn.

Saturday,  we were all up for a a visit to BrookGreen Garden's  in Murrells Inlet.

The children's garden was a big hit and brought out the play in everyone.

Of course there were lots of photo ops

Brothers

for family groupings

Sisters

Aunt and Niece

Spouses

Jeannie and Bernard Baruch

and individual  shots

Dave and Don Quixote

After several hours of  walking the  beautiful but expansive gardens,

we were all ready for  a cooling drink in the shade of the old kitchen patio

But we couldn't tarry too long 

or we would have missed our river boat tour of the BrookGreen ricefields .

The hour long boat tour  through Brookgreen's tidal creeks was not only informative, but gave us a much needed chance to rest our legs.

And then we were off and running again to see a craft show,

 followed by spending the rest of the day at Pawleys Island Beach

Night of a Thousand Candles 12' 14

Bruce and I made our now annual trip to   Brookgreen Gardens to attend their Night of a Thousand Candles Festival..  This is one of our favorite events of the holiday season and one we always look forward to attending..  

BJ  in the garden

For nine evenings in December all 500 acres of the garden are lighted by holiday displays and  remain open until 10 pm giving the public an opportunity to explore the gardens after dark.. 

CC with camera

For photographers, the event offers a rare opportunity to capture nocturnal views of  the garden's  grounds and the magnificent sculptures .   No matter how cold the weather, Bruce and I bundle up warmly enough to spend every minute we can  before the gates close on us.We come fully prepared with cameras, extra batteries, mono-pods, and spotlights.  About the only thing that can stop us is a rain heavy enough to damage our equipment and damp out the candles..  Unfortunately for the past couple of  years , this is exactly what has happened..  Rather than be rained out again, Brookgreen has changed the event's lighting from being 'The Night of a Thousand Candles' to what looked this year to be 'The Night of Ten Thousand LEDs' .  

The result were strikingly different in the kind of photographs one could capture.

2011 Candle it tree

For example compare the  photograph  above I took in 2011 of the candle lit Christmas tree

  with the blue mini-light trees that Bruce took at this years event.

2014 Blue mini-light trees

2011 photo of Sprites with floating candles and strobe backlighting

or the 2011 photo I took of the Sprites pond with the 2014 photo Bruce took of the

same sculpture pond

BJ's 2014 photo of sprites pond  with electric lights

2012 Tree Allee

Above is a photo I took in 2012  of the gardens  maganificent Tree Allee  and 

below is Bruce's photo of how it looked in 2014 with thousands of strands of mini-lights draping from every oak branch..

2014 Tree Allee

Personally I thought the number electric lights obscured the landscaping entirely ( as can be seen in several of the photos above)  

2012 Photo of a Heritage Tree

At best it made the landscaping play second fiddle to the lighting 

2014 Heritage Oak

That being said, the stronger lighting did provide some interesting opportunities to photograph the out of door sculpture collection. Check out the interesting effects we got from photographing the Sunflower Girl Sculpture in the  Children's Garden 

Lighted  from the front by a camera flash 

Lighted by a side strobe

Long exposure lighted by garden lights

Many of the other sculptures were equally interesting when seen by artificial light

Many of the other sculptures were equally interesting when seen by artificial light.

Snow Owl

For our part we both are hoping that the weather will eventually allow Brookgreen  to return to using more candles, but either way,  we will still  be attending the 2015 Festival.

Campbell Clan Cousins 10 '14

CC's and her Cousins Dolores Campbell Olsen and Janet Campbell Klick  strolled through  Brookgreen Gardens this afternoon, while Bruce and our cousin in law Richard Olsen played a round of golf on Willbrook Plantation.

Brookgreen's Fall Festival 10 "14

Bruce and I went to Brookgreen Garden's Fall Festival this afternoon.

Attending this annual event has become a tradition with us.

I don't think we have attended  the festival every year since we moved to South Carolina.

I love seeing all the different scarecrows that people make.

Watching the little kids  make them is especially fun.  

 They take it so seriously and often give their scarecrow names.

But of course there is more to the festival than building  scarecrows.

... like hay rides and pumpkin painting,

and listening to bluegrass bands.

I loved the Fall floral display, which Bruce quick decided would make a nice photo backdrop.

BJ and Bernard 7 '14

Bruce decided to get all chummy with Bernard Baruch at Brook green Gardens.

  They even look a bit alike.

Brookgreen River Boat Tour 7 '14

I think I remember being told that the sculpture gardens, open to the public,  comprise only about 450 acres out  of Brookgreen's 9000 total acreage. Much of Brookgreen property is in preserve .  The preserved areas can only be viewed on prescheduled tours such as their riverboat cruise which takes you up and down the tidal creeks within the Brookgreen Preserve. 

As part of it's' Cool Summer Evenings' program, Brookgreen Gardens has extended its  boat cruise tour schedule into the early evening hours.  Bruce and I decided this would be the perfect time to see  this lesser known  side of Brookgreen , so we hopped on board  a 48-foot pontoon boat  for a hour long cruise along historic ricefields now home to alligators, waterfowl, and osprey.

Our tour guide, Don Spriegel,  interpreted the distinctive landscape of the rice plantations and helped us to understand the role of enslaved Africans in the cultivation of the rice crop.

Small Cyprus tree 

First,  the massive cypress trees were dug up by young male slaves from, what was at that time, a mature old forest cypress swamp.

Dykes  held back the tidal waters

Once the swamps were rid of the forest, the branches of the cypress were pounded into the mud to make  a dyke, and soil dug out of the swamp to build up the rice beds fields behind it. 

Trunk opening

Openings were left in the dykes  to called 'trunks'.  On the earliest plantations, hollowed out cypress tree trunks were place in these openings, with gates at either end, to control the flow of tidal water in and out of the fields. A later design looked like the Rice gate below..  

Rice Gates control water flow in and out of the rice fields

Shortly before the civil war, Georgetown county was the richest county in all of the colonies.  Except for the oaks in the residential areas, all of the land had been denuded of trees and converted to rice fields

Trees  grown since the civil war

After the war,  the slave labor force need to maintain this industry was no longer available, and the destitute landowners did not have the means to pay for the labor intensive farming.  The land began its slow  return to its natural form.  Today the Bald Cyprus and

Tupelo trees are once again reclaiming the land that was once theirs.

The hour went all too quickly, and soon we were seeing the sun playing peek a boo with the edges of the  horizon.  It was promising another beautiful sunset over the peaceful tidal creeks.