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Hey y'all, welcome back to the Biscuits and Gravy podcast. I'm Michelle, I'm your host, and I'm taking you to some quintessential southern places. And today is no exception. I'm very excited to talk about one of my favorite new places. This is the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
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Now if you've listened to the show for a while, you know I'm a huge fan of the Pinehurst area. I love the Sandhills. I grew up not far from here and I worked in that area for quite some time before I got married and had children. And I just love that area so much that I use any excuse I can to go back and visit. So...
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I honestly don't know how I came to the realization that there was this nice, very well kept botanical garden in Pinehurst, but I'm so glad that I did. We have been to the gardens twice now and I'm already looking for an excuse to go back. My kids loved it the first time we went. The second time we went, we took our...
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school group from our church and I think everyone had a great time. We actually went on a formal tour that time and it took about an hour and they were so sweet and so kind and they really catered to like the ages of our group. We have a lot of younger children in our homeschool group and so they kept it.
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moving. They kept it very friendly and fun so that nobody was getting bored and nobody was complaining about they were tired or anything like that. Now if you want to walk the entire garden it is quite a bit of walking. I am looking online right now so that I can give you the most accurate description of the gardens.
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and what to expect. So it actually doesn't say on their website how many miles of walking there is, but there's a lot of meandering pathways and there's several different gardens and I'm gonna describe all of those to you in just a second so that you'll know what all you're going to be encountering when you go to visit the gardens. But they do have a...
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Ball Garden Visitor Center is what you will encounter first when you park in the parking lot there. And this is actually an extension of Sandhills Community College, which has a landscape gardening program. So from what I understand, the students in this program are the ones who really keep up the gardens. They have volunteers.
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Also, and like the docents that were giving us our tour were volunteers there. But I believe most of the people that are keeping up the gardens are students at the college that is right beside of the garden. So it's really a cool like community effort kind of thing. If you would like a guided tour, they require 10 or more people.
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and give them at least two weeks notice. And it is free. It is free to visit the gardens. It's free to have a tour. And it's open daily from sunrise to sunset. And they do have some picnic tables there. So they have picnic tables like on the back patio of the visitor center and also in the lawn or on the lawn to the side of the visitor center. And so...
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plenty of places to picnic. When we took our homeschool group, we all stayed to have a picnic afterwards. One of the first places when you, well, let me just say the visitor center itself is really stunning. They have some things you can purchase in there, but even more importantly than that, they have lots of information in there about the gardens, what you're gonna be seeing, the different types of.
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plants that are growing, what is blooming right now. They have the events that are coming up, which I'll talk to you about in a little bit. And it's just beautiful. They have bathrooms in there, water fountain. It's just really well-kept. That's one thing I really, really like about it. Okay, so now I want to tell you a little bit about the gardens.
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And I'm just going to read this directly from their website. So I will link their website in the show notes so that you guys can go and check out all the information about the gardens if you'd like to plan your own visit, which I highly, highly recommend. All right, the Hackley Woodland Garden consists of a vast array of woodland and shade loving plants. It is mainly a concentration of many varieties of azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons.
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with other companion plants which have interest throughout the year. Then they have a fruit and vegetable garden. The fruit and vegetable garden includes an orchard of dwarf fruit trees, berries, vegetables, and a vineyard. They have a native wetland trail garden which is my son's favorite. He loves to, my oldest son, he loves to go as far as he can on this path.
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and it goes around a pond and that kind of thing. So it says, the Desmond native wetland trail garden is a nature conservancy and bird sanctuary with a boardwalk meandering among old poplars, pines, and plant material indigenous to wetland areas of the Sandhills. Then they have a holly garden, oh which they say
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that it is certified by the Holly Society of America and it's the largest accessible Holly collection on the East Coast. So that's cool.
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There are 28 holly species.
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Then they have a hillside garden, which is one of my favorite because it has a little creek that runs through it. The Atkins Hillside Garden includes a winding river rock stream with five bridges, waterfalls, pools, and the falls overlook, a gazebo surrounded by diverse plant material. Then they have a succulent garden. It's designed to show the use of succulents usually found in the southwest desert.
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setting but are perfectly happy in the Sandhills region of North Carolina. The walls surrounding the garden produce a microclimate making some marginally hardy plants capable of surviving in our environment. The area is mulched with various sized stones that retain heat very much like the desert. We saw a huge skink or a lizard of some sort in the succulent garden.
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so large that we had to ask one of the tour guides if it was real or if it was a statue because it was so large and it was not moving and it was real in fact. So all right then they have a conifer garden. So it features varieties of slow growing conifers that reflect color form and texture foliage not often viewed in the southern states in such a fine collection.
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It's the only garden that is totally different each year. Designs are selected well in advance so students can propagate and have plants ready on a schedule resulting in a variety of colors, textures, and heights. A different surprise theme is introduced each year. And they were telling us about this on the tour that it gets very creative and it's always fun to see what the students come up with for the annual garden. All right, my very favorite garden is the Sir Walter Raleigh Garden.
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The Sir Walter Raleigh Garden occupies more than an acre of land. It is a formal English garden, which was designed and constructed to commemorate the attempted colonization of Roanoke Island in 1584. This garden includes several mini gardens, including the holly maze, the fountain courtyard, the sunken garden, the ceremonial courtyard and the herb garden. So this is this is my
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My mecca. This is my place that I love to hang out when we go there. When we went on the tour, I actually had to run back to the car and get some water and missed this part of the tour. And I was so upset because this is my very favorite garden there at the horticultural garden. So I hope to spend a good amount of time there the next time.
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Then they have a children's garden. So the children's garden is a fun place for children to visit and see how to grow vegetables that they can be proud of. Margaret Ambrose Japanese Garden. The Japanese garden brings out the essence of nature in harmony with human intervention. This three acre Japanese garden has an entry bridge overlooking a dry creek bed, a tsukubai, which I don't know if I pronounced that right, which is a stone basin and drip fountain.
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Oh wow, I'm really getting into things I can't pronounce. So you'll have to go read this on the website, but I know nothing about Japanese gardens, but it's a really cool place, especially because we're not familiar with it and the different plants that they have in there. Then they have a rose garden, I love roses. The rose garden displays in promenade fashion a variety of old roses, which are considered to be among the best for the Sandhills region.
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and I know they recently had a rose growing class there. So we love it. Let me tell you about some things that are coming up there in case you want to go check them out at one of these special events. So it says all summer events are free but require registration. Okay, so they have a monthly tour of the gardens and...
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So the next tour is Thursday June 20th at 10 o'clock. So they planned it for this day because it's the first day of summer. So they're wanting everyone to come and see what plants are doing well in the summer heat. This is limited to 15 people, so just be aware of that. Critters in the Gardens, which is a kids event. And it's a rare Saturday morning workshop. It says...
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She'll be telling the, there's a Tabitha Riley, who is a recent graduate, who will be telling us about some of the animal life that lives in the gardens and how they interact with the plants, as well as the landscape, to create the ecosystem of the gardens. So it says that's good for ages five to 10, preferably. Then in July, they have a Figs, Fruits, and Other Edibles monthly tour. In August, they have
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Butterflies, Bees and Bugs monthly tour. And then when we went on our tour, they were telling us about this. There's a pollinator census in August as well. So come and count the pollinators with us. And that should be fun, especially for kiddos, I would think. But all of these programs are free during the summer. So I'm actually not seeing anything that is a paid program, but I know they did have...
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recently a rose class and they also had a lavender growing class and I know there is a small fee for each of those kinds of classes that they have and those are usually on um I think they're on week days and I'm looking forward to attending a class sometime. I really I had put on my calendar to try to make the rose class and the lavender class and something came up and I wasn't able to do it because we are about an hour.
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I live about an hour away from the garden, so it does take some planning. But we just love hanging out there, and really, I love to garden anyways. I feel very at peace in a garden. I told the kids that we ought to take our schoolwork sometime this next school year and just head down to the gardens and just find a spot, maybe in the Sir Walter Raleigh Gardens, and just find a spot.
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and do our schoolwork and it will be a nice change of scenery and very inspiring. And I don't know if I actually read anything about this part, but they have a little children's section that's right off of the back patio of the visitor center that has like some noise making elements and they have a big chalk wall so the kids can
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right with chalk on there and just play around a little bit. And it's just a nice, like, I think that is a good thing to draw children in and to get them excited, you know. Like, children are excited about flowers, I think, for the most part, and especially when they see bees and butterflies and that kind of thing. And, you know, I think it's always a good, you know, learning opportunity for children when you can be in a garden with them and just explain to them.
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you know, how it works and what pollination is and how we grow food and, you know, look at these beautiful things that the Lord's created for us to enjoy and we just have to take care of them and cultivate them and, you know, but I think sometimes it takes a little bit of a little bit of prompting, a little bit of excitement to get them excited about those things, but,
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The Sandhills Horticultural Gardens offering a little space for kids to just play, not have to be like educated the whole time, but just to play and be kids is a really great feature. I think, you know, they deserve some credit for providing that opportunity for kids to enjoy coming to the gardens too. So I have nothing negative to say about the Horticultural Gardens.
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I can't wait to go again. So I would encourage each of you if you are anywhere close to my neck of the woods in North Carolina, this is in Pinehurst, North Carolina, I suggest you plan a trip to the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens in Pinehurst, North Carolina and enjoy yourselves. Let me know if you go.
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And what your favorite garden, what your favorite spot in the garden is, I like, we have been twice and I don't think we have seen all of it. I know we haven't seen all of it, but I bet we haven't seen, I don't know, a third of it probably, because I do have a wide age range of children. And sometimes we have to just keep moving, you know? So.
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But yes, definitely check out the Sir Walter Raleigh Garden and the surrounding areas around there because that is my favorite by far. But everything else is very cool. Our tour group when we went saw a snake. I don't know what kind of snake it was. I actually didn't see it, but that was a cool little surprise that they got to see a snake.
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I love all the water elements too. I think that really adds a lot to the peace and calm of a space is to have some water elements. And so they do have that there. And the hillside garden is where you'll see a bunch of water there. And then like I said, there's the wetland trail that goes through the wetland area and around a pond. That's really cool. My kids love that part.
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It is getting to be pretty hot out there, but I would say that a lot of the gardens most of the gardens are very shaded so It's not It's not miserable or anything like that So I can't wait. I plan to go back to the gardens Pretty much every season if possible just to see what's in bloom. I mean The two visits that we've had have been only a month apart and I could not believe
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how things had changed in a month. I know from my own small garden here at home, just how quickly things changed, but I was really blown away at how much had changed there just in that month span. So it's so cool. It's like a museum that changes all the time. So I highly recommend, I think you guys would love it, especially if gardens are your thing.
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Remember back to the Middleton Place episode that we did from the Charleston excursion that I went on with my girls. And the gardens were just the best part of that trip, you know, I believe. And the girls too, like when we think back to our Charleston trip, we think about the gardens at Middleton. And can't wait to go back. My oldest was actually considering asking for a trip back to Middleton for her birthday this year. That's how much she loved them.
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So we are garden people for sure. And if you are, then you will have to go check it out. Well, thank you for listening to this short little episode on the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens. And I hope that you will join me for our next episode, which is going to be about a sweet little cafe that is now in a restored.
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or renovated service station in a nearby town. And some friends of ours did all that themselves. And I got the opportunity to go down there this week and to see it. And I'm just so excited for them. And they did such an excellent job. So I can't wait to share about that with you guys on the next episode. So I will talk to you then, bye.
