Located at Clemson University, the gardens offer easy walking amid plantings and habitats from all across the Palmetto State.
Leonard M. and Laurie Adkins
The duck pond sits near the cove habitats and the mountain bog.
“I know we’re hungry, but come on, we can do this. How long can it take to do an easy one-mile roundtrip walk?”
It’s well past noon, hours after an early breakfast, and we are in Clemson’s South Carolina Botanical Garden, and I have just talked Laurie into taking what I believed would be a quick walk.
South Carolina Botanical Garden Facebook
Oconee bells are famous both for their beauty and their rarity.
Little did I know that the garden had undertaken a major project that would enable visitors to walk through the many different environments that exist in the state from the coast to the mountains. This wasn’t done by merely placing plants from the various habitats into the ground. Garden personnel actually transported material from different parts of the state, such as the soil that was brought in from the east to create the sandhills where the coastal plain meets the piedmont or the granite flatrocks to create habitat for prickly pear cactus and resurrection fern.
All of this was done around 2011, so the locations have had more than a decade to recover from construction and are now, truly, natural environmental habitats and not artificially created sites. So much so that we could feel the dry heat emanating from the granite rocks or the temperature dropping as we entered the moisture-laden environment of the cove forest.
It addition to these sensory feelings, we were amazed at the incredible number of plants growing along the half-mile trail—Spanish moss draped over spreading live oak trees, trillium growing along the border of a salt marsh, pitcher plants and sundews actively working to capture insects, five-foot-tall prairie grasses and wild ginger in close proximity to the peeling bark of yellow birch trees.
Sue Watts
The blue dasher dragonfly is common at the South Carolina Botanical Garden.
What really slowed us down, though, was the information to be gleaned from the abundance of interpretive signs. I never knew that the Venus fly-trap is native only to a narrow strip of land near the coasts of North and South Carolina. Or that the middens created by the cast-off oyster shells of Native Americans through thousands of years deposited so much calcium that they changed the pH of the soil. And no wonder, in my thousands of miles of Blue Ridge wanderings, I have only seen Oconee bells in one place—they are so rare that in the 1700s and 1800s they went unreported for nearly 100 years.
We returned to our car nearly two hours after setting out, better educated but definitely much hungrier. Luckily, a favorite Clemson sports bar, the Esso Club, is less than a 10-minute drive from the botanical garden. Although packed to almost standing room only, the quick service, local brews on tap and a traditional South Carolina menu offering of meat and three (a meat, most often fried, accompanied by three side dishes) quickly made our stomachs much happier.
Awaiting us tomorrow, we knew, were additional miles of botanical garden trails winding through the 295 acres and going by 400 varieties of hostas, a dwarf conifer garden, what is believed to be the largest outdoor desert east of the Mississippi, a duck pond, two historic homes and the plot of camellias that were the impetus to create the botanical garden in the 1950s.
When You Go
South Carolina Botanical Garden Facebook
Trillium grows along the border of the garden’s salt marsh.
The Walk: The Natural Heritage Trail is only one mile (roundtrip) of easy walking. At least four more miles of trails wind throughout the entire botanical garden. No fee is charged to visit.
Getting There: From the US 76/SC 93 intersection in Clemson, drive southward on US 76 for less than 0.5 mile and turn right onto Perimeter Road. Go another 0.6 mile, make a left onto Garden Trail (which becomes Discovery Lane in 0.3 mile) and come to a parking area in an additional 0.1 mile.
More Information: A wealth of information about the garden and a map are on clemson.edu/scbg.
Leonard has written 20 books on the outdoors and travel. Find out more at www.habitualhiker.com.
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2024 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!