Five years in the making, the landscape and gardens planned by Dabney
Peeples for an Alta Vista estate are quietly dimensional
/ by Leigh Savage / photography by Jerry Finley
Dabney Peeples says his job is to design gardens that look like they weren’t designed at all. Today, he’s checking up on a completed project at the home of Heather and Glenn Hilliard on Crescent Avenue and blithely paraphrases Dolly Parton: “It takes a whole lot of money to look this cheap, and it takes a whole lot of effort to look this casual.”
As lead designer of J. Dabney Peeples Design Associates Inc., he is well known for his expertise in creating gardens of all types, but this project, which he began five years ago and included Kenny Collins of The Collins Group as head of installation, brings together many of his favorite elements, especially the extensive use of native plants and the unique combinations of annuals, perennials, and evergreens.
Peeples is masterful at using a variety of plants together and enjoys the challenge that involves thinking in four dimensions: length, width, height, and time. “Things come up and go down, and if you do it correctly, they come up in concert together and play a section of music, and then they’re quiet and then another section comes up and plays.” Like conducting an orchestra, “but in slow motion and quietly.”
To the immediate left of the stately home, Peeples took what was once a lawn with gnarled shrubs and transformed it into multiple spaces that he refers to as garden rooms. A secret garden is hidden behind a gate, which also houses a tunnel leading into the home’s basement. Inside the gate is a stretch of lawn with a “loose, kind of grandmothery sort of garden,” he says. “It’s supposed to look like people gave you stuff and you brought it in.”
The Hilliards are grandparents, and they can close the gate while the children safely play on this lawn, in the fairy garden, or in the copper-roofed pavilion, which Peeples smartly set to one side, ensuring it wouldn’t look too formal on the property’s footprint.
While the size of these outdoor spaces bring to mind a backyard, this is actually the side yard with a variety of garden rooms along its perimeter, including a compost area with seating. Heather serves on the board of the S.C. Botanical Garden along with Peeples, and he calls her a real gardener. “It makes sense that she’d have seating by the compost, because she’s proud of it… real gardeners get that.”
Behind the home is a backyard that is no more than 10 feet deep, but Peeples maximized its space by installing a linear vegetable courtyard; it faces south and is blocked from northerly winds, allowing an olive tree, turnip greens, asparagus, garlic chives, oregano, and rosemary to thrive. Also in this courtyard is confederate jasmine, which blooms with intense fragrance, reminiscent of Charleston’s walled gardens in the spring. One of Peeples’ favorite plants is here, too; the Edgeworthia, which has large, white fragrant blooms in the middle of winter. He believes only a serious gardener would know of it and, with a bit of a laugh, refers to it as horticultural code. “It’s ugly in a pot,” he says, “but you don’t want something that just looks cute in a pot, because that’s boring.”
To the right of the home is a garden built for honeybees, home to several hives as well as the potager garden, which is an organized formal vegetable garden. Peeples says he designed it in sections, like a Persian carpet. In spring, the garden has cabbages and other crops in pretty designs and in winter, it’s a cover crop, like kale, which will later be tilled under. A central staddle stone, designed by Peeples, has been installed here to provide the bees a place to drink. It’s based on the stones once used to lift granaries above the ground to protect them from rodents. “Now we don’t harvest our own grain, but to me, these are beautiful,” he says. Water spills along the stone and is shallow enough for the bees to sit in. Peeples opens the large metal gate latch and listens intently as it closes. “I just love latches that are purposeful,” he says. “Isn’t that a great sound?”
Even the parking in front of the home is well considered, with large stones made of petrified lake mud (a close inspection shows how the waves of the lake left patterns on the stones). At the far left of the home is a space full of plants that are native to South Carolina, many of which are rarely seen these days. Glenn, a well-known environmentalist, wanted a garden that reflected the state’s botany.
Originally a low, soggy sliver of land purchased from a neighbor, this naturalized garden now looks like a found piece of forest from decades ago, full of unique and rare plants from South Carolina as well as old stones, shortcut paths, a swing, and a bench made of recycled granite curbs from downtown Greenville, all designed by Peeples.
It was a studied process to create what is now a fully native gardenscape. The first step was getting rid of invasive plants and then came raising up the soggy beds. A drainage system helps put rain back into the ground without drowning the plants, and stones of various ages help hold up the soil. Stones with various amounts of wear were selected “to make it look like this evolved over time. It’s two years old, but it looks like it’s been here forever,” says Peeples.
After paying attention to grading and drainage, good soil full of decomposed leaves was hauled in. The native plants have thrived in the new environment, including creeping phlox, galax, rattlesnake plantain, and even a rare pawpaw tree that grows a double fruit (only good for a day or two, it tastes like a blend of banana, mango, and pineapple). Pinckneya from the Lowcountry thrives next to a rhododendron native to the Caesar’s Head area, a combination not possible in most of the world.
“That’s the beauty of the Greenville area,” Peeples says. “It’s one of the most ecologically diverse places anywhere in the eastern U.S., where ecosystems collide. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
