Thursday, July 14, 2011

Not Rock City, but just as fascinating


If you just happen to pull into the right cove on this lake in Alabama, you might get a glimpse of one of the most extraordinary gardens anywhere.  The owner has turned a series of hillsides into an enchanted place, chock full of beautiful flowers, shrubs, ferns, lilies, iris, hydrangeas, hostas - you name it.  He's got it.

And not only does he have a mind-boggling collection of plants, he must have a million rocks of all shapes and sizes and boulders (the latter you'd swear had been there forever because they are way too large to have ever been moved).

The amazing part?  There wasn't so much as a stone on this property when he started.

I haven't seen the garden in a couple of years, but I understand it's been expanded beyond anyone's wildest imagination.  How the owner can come up with such ideas is impossible for an ordinary soul to understand.

Suffice it to say that the garden is creative, funny, whimsical and magical, as well as beautiful.  It has many flower-lined paths that lead to even more lovely places. You can sit in a rock grotto, pass under waterfalls, follow stone-lined waterways and dip your hand into stone pools, walk along a sky path and pass beneath stone arches.  At every turn, you see something new and wonder how this amazing man could ever have thought all this up, much less executed it.  I'm still trying to figure it out.

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