Cypress Gardens
— — the swamp that holds the sky upside down.
Not only on a wall.
“A blackwater swamp garden outside Moncks Corner, where flat-bottomed boats drift between bald cypress and tupelo and the tea-coloured water turns the canopy into a second forest below. Spring brings azaleas and camellias along the dyke trails; summer brings the dragonflies. The Notebook was filmed on this water, and people still come looking for that quiet. Most afternoons the loudest thing is a heron lifting off a knee. — from the studio
Cypress Gardens, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cypress Gardens sits on the old Dean Hall rice plantation reserve in Berkeley County, South Carolina, about 24 miles north of Charleston near Moncks Corner. The 170-acre park centres on a blackwater swamp fed by the Cooper River basin, where bald cypress and tupelo gum rise from tannin-stained water. Benjamin Kittredge began shaping the gardens in the 1920s and gifted them to the City of Charleston in 1963; Berkeley County has run them since 1996. Flat-bottomed johnboats glide a one-mile loop through the cypress, and dyke trails wind past azalea and camellia plantings beneath live oaks draped in Spanish moss.
The water here is not muddy. It is blackwater — stained the colour of strong tea by tannins leaching from cypress bark and decaying leaves, with a pH that often runs below 4. Because the swamp is largely still, the surface mirrors the canopy almost perfectly, and a boat in the right light seems to float between two forests. The 1989 sweep of Hurricane Hugo and the 2015 South Carolina flood both filled the basin and shut the park for repairs; the cypress themselves, some over a century old, came through both.
The park opens Tuesday through Sunday and charges modest admission for adults, with a separate fee for the swamp boat. Spring, from late March through April, is the high season for azaleas and camellias along the garden walks. Summer brings butterflies in the heated conservatory and the swamp at its loudest with frogs and cicadas. Allen Notebook fans still recognise the cypress channels from the 2004 film, parts of which were shot here. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and the October 2015 flood both forced multi-year closures; the gardens reopened in 2019 after the most recent restoration.