Series Teaser: Woodland Edge Plantings in the South

This blog will probably always be updated more in the spring and the fall, since those are the Southern garden's pretty-and-interesting seasons.  However, all the seeds are finally, finally in the ground (with luck, they'll come in next year even if this year was way too late ... heck, who knows, in a normal year this might have been good timing ... and we still have a fall planting of milkweed and Sweet Joe Pye weed to do in probably early October).

There's a gardening report to come once I finish learning my part as Floride (it's pronounced fleur-REED) Calhoun for our Meet the Pendletonians event (it's $3 a carload tomorrow at Ashtabula! Join us!), and an upcoming series that I think will be of interest to everyone who loves history or works in landscape management.  Here's a teaser.

This is what the woodland edge, where the plantation grounds suddenly stop and yield to a tangle of dappled-shade growth, looks like in late spring in the Upstate:

This, on the other hand, is how a plantation's woodland edge grows in the Low Country, near Charleston:

 

Note the actual presence of palmettos and the rich, goopy, gorgeous, organically-rich black soil.  Does anyone else kinda want to roll around in it, or is that just me?