Anne Halpin's new book on coastal gardening features eleven coastal gardens from Maine to South Carolina. Two of these gardens are on Kiawah Island and were designed by Clyde Timmons and DesignWorks. Click here to order a copy of this great book (excerpt below).

DESIGNING WITH NATURE

Kiawah Island, South Carolina

By Anne Halpin

On a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, there’s a wonderful example of how native plants can be used to integrate a seaside house into a beautiful natural setting and create a landscape that is sophisticated yet low maintenance.

The house is built of wood and stone; it’s natural and rustic, yet elegant and stylish. To take advantage of the unspoiled character of the maritime forest site, landscape architect Clyde Timmons, of DesignWorks in Charleston, created a garden that relies heavily on native plants to fit the house comfortably into its surroundings.

To reach the house, you travel along a winding drive paved with crunchy, dark crushed slag through a woodland planted with ferns and dwarf palms. The natural environment here is so beautiful that the designer and the owners agreed they wanted a landscape that blended into its surroundings, with some added touches of color and texture.

As a starting point, they decided to preserve the magnificent huge old live oaks (Quercus virginiana) that graced the property. The architecture of the house already embraced the trees – the outstanding feature of the house is a circular glass block tower with a spiral staircase that is located right under one of the live oaks. Climbing the stairs feels like walking through the branches of the tree.

There were also native wax myrtles (Myrica cerifera), yaupon hollies (Ilex vomitoria) and palmettos (Sabal palmetto). The natural vegetation was enhanced with additional plantings on the grounds just beyond the house. Once established, these natives need little in the way of maintenance, tolerating drought, heat and the salt winds off the river that flows behind the property. Another plus is that the plentiful deer population leaves the plants alone. Needle palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix), a hardy and shade-tolerant native, was added here for greater textural contrast.

Close by the river at the rear of the property is a marsh dominated by a native cordgrass, Spartina alternifolia. Along the edge of the marsh, Timmons and his team planted another native marsh cordgrass, Spartina patens, which can tolerate periodic saltwater flooding.

Closer to the house, the plantings combine with striking architectural features to create a more controlled, elegant, but still natural look. The house itself is actually two separate buildings linked by a courtyard. Here, there is a rectangular lap pool surrounded by a terrace of cut bluestone, which is bordered with rippling bands of rounded river stone alternating with dwarf mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) that reinforce the linear feeling and create an interesting contrast of textures. In a bit of serendipity, the homeowners had chosen tiles with a wavy pattern to run down the center of the bottom of the pool, a perfect complement to the pattern of the mondo grass and river stone. Designer and owners were thinking on the same plane, which made for a very successful collaboration...