(Menaka and Chriselle on the classy streets of Charleston)O

The next day, we drove about an hour north, glimpsing water frequently in patches all along the intra-coastal highway, to Beaufort, a charming town halfway between Savannah and Charleston.

Here too, our walking tour of the city (left) and the riverfront allowed us to view double-storied plantation style mansions with wide porches (since square footage covered by porches are not taxed in the state!). Our quest for a typical Southern pecan pie did not bring very productive results but we settled for satisfyingly warm wedges of snickers pie and apple pie in a snazzy café called Muddy Waters as we overlooked the river. Full of ritzy stores offering decorative home accessories, Beaufort’s main street and the few old side streets that comprise its downtown area were very appealing and beautifully preserved. Knowing that Beaufort was settled by plantation owners in the same manner that Charleston was, I experienced quiet excitement as I awaited the charms of this enchanting city yet to come.

And Charleston did not disappoint. The city wove its irresistible spells around me so that I felt transported to a magical world and wished never to be brought back to reality. Parking our car, once again, in the Visitors Center as advised, we followed the route suggested by our trusty guidebook into the historic quarter where the ambience is decidedly French. And little wonder since it was the French Huguenots who, escaping religious persecution in France, first arrived as settlers on Charleston’s waterfront. The English followed suit, of course, naming the city “Charles Town” after their own monarch but the French stamp of cultural dominance was already branded upon the city by the time of the French arrival so that the English made little dent in its atmosphere. Roughly broken into two halves, designated by Broad Street (“The Broad”, to locals), locations are mentioned as being “North of the Broad” or “South of the Broad”. Indeed as one crosses the Broad and arrives closer to the sea front, the antebellum mansions get fancier, their dimensions growing breathtakingly more commodious, their embellishments far more ornate and the gardens much more ravishing. It was with the gardens that I was chiefly enraptured as I used my camera liberally to capture the artful arrangement of gravel pathways and rippling waters vomited by ornate stone lion’s heads, neatly-clipped English boxwood edges and concrete parterres, beds of flowering tulips and occasional benches in the style of Sir Edwin Lutyens, all enclosed within mossy brick walls and ornamental wrought-iron gates. Charleston is a garden lover’s Paradise, a city in which even the narrowest strip of soil separating two buildings is used skillfully to create a natural vignette oozing with appeal.

It was in Charleston that I met my French friend, former Metropolitan Museum docent, Martine Dulles and her lovely daughter Emelie. Recently relocated from Manhattan to this delightful city, Martine runs a custom-designed stationary business from a shop front in the heart of the historical district, cheek by jowl with a well-visited antebellum mansion called the Heywood-Washington House. Upon her advice, Menaka and I took an interior tour of the home and emerged both awed and edified by the lifestyle of erstwhile Colonial plantation owners. In the hands of a superbly informed guide, we toured the rooms, noticed their rich accoutrements and finely-wrought furniture. We even saw the most priceless piece of Colonial furniture in America today, a vast tall-boy used as a bookcase that has withstood the booming canons of the American Revolution and the Civil War, countless hurricanes and thunderstorms to remain intact with not even a single glass panel ever replaced. We learned in this home that the Colonial English ate at quite ordinary dining tables but adorned them with tablecloths in luscious fabrics such as damask and linen, changing each cloth with the china and silverware for each course so that dessert was eventually served upon the bald tabletop. We saw the chamber pots in the bedrooms, inserted into the “Chair of Necessity” that each room boasted, since the “Necessity Rooms” or toilets were outhouses, reached by walking through the backdoor and into the garden. And, of course, it was with the garden that I found myself most preoccupied. Here, giant boxwood topiaries, naughty cherubs spouting waters over their plump limbs and gravel pathways led one to the bottom of the garden where a bench was thoughtfully provided for quiet contemplation.

With sustenance sought at the Smokestack Brewery amidst gargantuan copper burnished vats brewing potent beers, we renewed our quest for the city’s jewels, rambling at leisure through the thickly canopied streets created by the conjoining of ancient live oaks from whose mighty limbs Spanish moss hung like bunches of mauve wisteria. This natural phenomenon is seen all over the South and became for us an unending curiosity. We even asked a passerby what the tree was called; only to have him mishear us into thinking we wished to inquire about the name of the street.
“Jones Street”, he said.
“Jones Tree?” I replied.

When the confusion was cleared, these quiet handsome live oak trees, dripping with moss, became known to us as “Jones Trees”, much to our private amusement. As we neared the water’s edge, we passed by umpteen horse-drawn carriages, the periodic clip-clop of the horse’s hooves adding to the romantic old-world ambience of this fascinating city. In the endless maze that comprises Charleston’s classy shopping district, I was reminded very much of the chic ambience of the French Riviera and in the vivid awnings that protected the opening of every boutique and designer store, I recalled the pleasures I had once taken in the exclusively moneyed atmosphere of Nice and Monte Carlo. Each street was lined with buildings whose facades were painted in ice-cream shades of creamy vanilla and mouthwatering strawberry. I could gladly live in Charleston, I thought, convincing myself yet again that it was in an earlier epoch that I most certainly belonged. There, on East Battery Street, with the horizon before us and sprawling antebellum mansions in frosty pastels behind us, we soaked in Charleston’s special appeal. Later, at Rainbow Row, appropriately named for the vibrant hues that color the facades of the gabled row houses, I took more pictures. Charleston allowed me to nurse my love of architecture and gardens with unashamed zeal and I thrilled at the opportunity to behold its splendor.

One couldn’t leave this bastion of Old Southern culture without visiting a plantation and at the advise of the personnel at the Visitor’s Center, we drove a few miles outside of Charleston, stopping en route to partake of a humongous Lowcountry Breakfast (eggs, sausage, bacon, grits, orange juice, coffee) at a local diner, to Boone Hall Plantation.

Driving under another allee of ancient, moss-festooned live oaks, we encountered the Georgian-style brick facade of the mansion. A far cry from the legendary Tara of Gone With the Wind (which was, after all, a film set dismantled after the movie was shot), Boone Hall  (above left) offered a glimpse into the South’s antebellum past when the wealthy lived a charmed life served by their loyal black slaves. While we enjoyed the gardens, ablaze with camellias in every shade of pink, rose bushes that, no doubt, later in the season would sweetly scent the air, Icelandic poppy borders that glowed with electric colors, we were disappointed by the house simply because the tour was given by a guide who seemed completely disinterested in the task at hand. Clearly routine had returned to her work for she mouthed her monologue in a manner that would most certainly have failed to make the grade at the Met where, thankfully, the standards are far more exacting. We did make our way through a spacious living room and library, a stone paved loggia and garden room cozied up with wicker; but details that one so desperately desired about the provenance of the priceless antique furniture displayed within remained mysteriously unavailable. Satisfaction came in exploring the slave cabins (above right) on “Slave Street”, also on the plantation grounds, where aspects of the lives of slaves owned and regulated by their aristocratic masters kept us enthralled. We saw African-Americans, the probable descendants of erstwhile slaves, still weave sweet grass baskets in the manner in which slaves once did, in brick cabins that were made on the plantation grounds by the slaves themselves from silt that washed up against the creek that bordered the plantation. It was truly an interesting excursion but one that could have been made far more enjoyable by the efforts of a more assiduous guide.

Our head port of call was Hilton Head Island, a truly glamorous place stacked with manicured golf courses and trendy boutiques.