House 
Vol. VI 
and Garden 
September, 1904 No. 3 
CAMDEN GARDENS 
By C ORINNE H ORTON 
T HK delicate charm that attaches itself to 
all old things is keenly felt in the presence 
of an old garden where plant life left to itself 
attempts to write a history of the flight of 
time in its own peculiar way. Among the best 
examples of formal gardening to be found in 
the South are the gardens at Camden, S. C., a 
quaint old town flavored still with the delight¬ 
ful aroma of the past, flooded with sunshine 
the year round, displaying here and there white 
columns and Colonial porticoes between 
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vistas of trees, as in the case of many 
a quaint old Georgian house. Walking or 
driving through the residence portion of the 
town, you come unawares upon what a clever 
critic has pronounced the rarest of earthly 
things in America—a genuine architectural 
emotion. 
Although Camden was settled in 1750,- 
the oldest gardens there are post-revolution- 
ary. The first seems to have been planted 
about 1830; others were begun as late as 
1850. At this period Southern life had 
reac hed its 
most finished 
point. Slave 
labor was be¬ 
coming skilled; 
the Southern 
planter had ac¬ 
quired a fortune 
and was now in 
a position to 
allow himself, 
among other 
things, the de¬ 
lights of a gar¬ 
den. The for¬ 
ests, still in 
their virgin 
state, were full 
of holly, South Carolina olive, commonly 
called “ mock-orange ” in the vernacular of 
the people, bay-trees, magnolias, mimosa, cy¬ 
press, hawthorne, hackberry, dogwood, fringe- 
tree, willow-oak, Cherokee roses, yellow jas¬ 
mine, and other flowering trees, shrubs and 
vines. 
Competent critics have declared the gar¬ 
dens at Camden equal to those of many 
old English manor houses, which speaks well 
for the virtue of the sand and pine region 
in which the town is located, and for the 
skill, too, of the landscape gardeners who 
designed such places as “ Pine Flat,” now 
Hobkirk Inn, originally established by W. 
M. Shannon, of Camden. The gardens cover 
forty acres. They were laid out and planted 
by a landscape gardener from Columbia— 
one Crammond. The hedges of “ Pine 
Flat” are still perfectly kept; the smooth 
walks with their angles, squares, triangles, 
circles, and parallelograms stretch evenly be¬ 
fore you in the bright warm sunshine. Many 
of the flowers 
that once grew 
in abundance 
there have 
disappeared ; 
but the won¬ 
derful shrub¬ 
bery remains. 
Another cele¬ 
brated old gar¬ 
den at Camden, 
“ Lausan ne,” 
as it was first 
called, was 
planted by 
John de Saus- 
sure, a French 
Huguenot. 
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Copyright, IQ04 , —Henry T, Coates Co, 
