You Know You're in a Southern Lowcountry Preppy's Garden When...

Gardening beauty can be found everywhere within Southern Lowcountry Preppy environs... even cut hydrangeas in a garden trug awaiting being taken on into the house.

You know you're in a Southern Lowcountry Preppy's garden when...

• fiddler crabs are scampering around the herb bed


• the kitchen garden's plantings include greens, okra, butter beans


• hydrangeas bloom in the yard


• the assorted garden trugs being used are antiques


• garden tools, watering cans, boots and clogs are from England


• the garden's scents include gardenia, honeysuckle, jasmine


• there's a vine of confederate jasmine creeping up somewhere along a fence


• garden accent colors are soft pastels amid various hues of green


• there's not a garden gnome or pink flamingo statuette in sight


• red brick is the bed liner, walkway and patio flooring of choice


• there's a Charleston bench underneath a shade tree


• inside and out, Camellias grace the atmosphere: both cut and also left on the bushes


• terracotta pots of mint are prolific due to the year-round drinking of iced tea


• the potting bench and garden shed areas are as pleasant and pretty as the garden itself


• there's a damp, soil-dusted gardening journal log being used for record keeping


• beat-up looking old wide-brimmed straw hats hang about for continual use


• clumps of Spanish Moss seem to be everywhere


• rose clippings are being rooted in washed-out glass jam jars


• a chipped bowl of Johnson Brother's "Old British Castles" holds some seeds

...and so forth and so on... As anyone who's read the now classic, Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden knows, gardening in the Southern Lowcountry is not just part of one's life, it's part n' parcel of one's overall lifestyle. Being in a warmer clime, the year-round indoor/outdoor nature of residing within the deep coastal south seems to encourage a continual gardening experiencing. Whether it's acres of "grounds" being tended or a tiny potted herb garden set out just off of a back door's stoop, many lowcountry Preppies enjoy the rewards of their green thumbs being put to such daily delightful use.