“Jack is a history guy,” says Millie McCandless with a smile. Her husband’s vintage-loving disposition is on full display as he shows off the newly restored garden at Hilgay, the couple’s historic Craftsman/English Country estate in Flat Rock, built by the legendary architect Richard Sharp Smith.
He offers an enthusiastic discourse about the mossy brick edging of the flowerbeds. They’re installed Charleston-style, on end — unlike some of the bricks the couple found under the house, stamped “Biltmore” from that Asheville mansion’s old brickworks foundry.
Most families who summered in Flat Rock beginning in the 1820s were from Charleston, Jack points out, and the garden, created sometime between 1905 and 1914, was typical of the coastal city’s English formal style, with beds laid out in geometric patterns.
For 10 years, the McCandlesses have painstakingly renovated their home, established in 1894 as a summer getaway for Emma Drayton-Grimke, a relative of the then-rector of St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church in Flat Rock.
The first time they saw the house, those historic brick borders, among the few remnants of the old garden, were buried under a thicket of head-high azaleas. They spent several years in research before beginning the restoration, including contacting a number of Drayton-Grimke’s descendants to get photos of the garden as it was originally conceived. They also acquired some correspondence between Drayton-Grimke and the landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, Jr., who was, at the time, helping his father, the eminent Olmsted, Sr., design the grounds of Biltmore Estate. It’s still uncertain exactly how much influence the younger Olmsted had over the grounds at Hilgay, but records show he did visit the site as a consultant for at least one day, to the tune of $100.
The McCandlesses’ first step was to relocate the 150 tall azaleas. Most of them were moved just beyond the garden’s perimeter or placed in clusters in the surrounding woods. From there they could make out the rest of the original bones of the place, hardscaping that included granite retaining walls, a bench, and pond fountain; walking paths; and a sundial pedestal.
Old photographs showed white gravel paths; these were recreated using locally sourced stone from Fletcher Limestone Company quarry. When it came to plantings, historical accuracy had to take a backseat to botanical constraints. In the hundred years since the garden was designed, its location has been transformed from an open, sunny hillside providing vistas of Glassy Mountain to towering woods with a dense understory of rhododendrons. The photos show the beds filled with roses; today the McCandlesses are limited to plants that thrive in deep shade. They settled on tree-form Tardiva hydrangeas and dwarf English boxwood, surrounding seasonal plantings of annuals (for now, multicolored impatiens). Hostas around the perimeter give way to the transplanted azaleas, gradually blending into the wild woods beyond.
The formal layout of the garden, centered around the original sundial, provides an ideal backdrop for contemplating the passage of time. Jack rhapsodizes about the changing patterns of sunrays on the paths throughout the day, the occasional perfect shaft breaking through to light the fountain. Millie is effusive about seasonal variations on the acreage surrounding the garden: in spring, the property is overhung with dogwood (among numerous other blooming species), in summer with mountain laurel and rhododendron. Autumn turns the Japanese maple — an original tree that’s bounced back admirably from neglect — a fiery orange.
Another nearby specimen, a towering conifer with vertical cones and unusual soft needles, was a mystery for some time. “We must have had half-a-dozen arborists here before one of them could identify that tree,” reveals Jack. It’s a Nikko Fir, native to the mountains of central Japan, and probably the only one in this region. Before the house was built, the land’s original owner was Edward Reed Memminger, an avid horticulturalist known to have traveled in Asia.
It was a hobby common among the wealthy in those days, although bringing a specimen tree back home wasn’t exactly a leisurely feat. At the very least, it meant lugging it aboard a ship to Charleston and then by horse-cart up into the mountains.
Above the garden pond hangs a carved stone plaque that reads: The Lord God Walked in the Garden in the Cool of the Day. A hundred years ago, says Jack, kids used to play here. They have a photograph of three small children in antique bathing costumes clustered in the small pool, their kerchiefed nanny beside them. Viewed beside the stone plinth at the far end of the garden, down the immaculate white central promenade past the sundial to the gurgling fountain, the garden seems timeless. It’s a still pocket in the woods, the cicadas are singing, and the weighty history of the place is vivid — and quite near.