A few days ago I visited Maclay Gardens State Park for about the millionth time in my life, and once again I was utterly amazed by its beauty. It didn’t matter that I’d been there before. I walked the old familiar paths and felt just as enchanted as I did when I was young and everything was new.

Maclay Gardens has the lushest Spanish moss.

The gardens were started in 1923 by Alfred B. Maclay, a prominent New York banker, and his wife, Louise, after they bought an old hunting plantation on the north side of Tallahassee to serve as their winter home. The Maclays worked on the gardens for 20 years, gradually expanding them until they covered 23 acres. It was a labor of love. Alfred approached landscape design the way a painter approaches painting. He “painted” with plants. He was always thinking about color, shape, texture, balance, and unity.

The gardens are built along the west side of Lake Hall, under soaring pines and grand, spreading live oaks. A wide, curving brick walk leads from the garden entrance past a woodland area and a lakeside pavilion to the Maclay House, an elegant little cottage painted bright salmon pink. (Apparently Louise chose the color as a sort of tribute to the area’s red-clay soil.) To the west of the walk, there’s a walled garden, a secret garden, a pond, a reflecting pool, and lavish plantings of azaleas, camellias, and Japanese maples and magnolias.

The Maclay House

Plaque over the entrance to the walled garden

Detail of an iron bench by the walled garden

The bench again

I recently read an interesting article in an old issue of the American Camellia Yearbook about the creation of the gardens, which the Maclays called “Killearn Gardens” after Alfred’s ancestral village in Scotland. There was a long description of how Alfred went about collecting his plants. He was an avid lover of camellias and dug hundreds of mature specimens from old gardens in and around Tallahassee. He got camellias from rich friends who lived on nearby plantations, but he also bought them from ordinary country people–flower enthusiasts who gardened for love and grew their camellias, painstakingly, from cuttings. Alfred drove all over Leon, Wakulla, and Jefferson counties, hunting camellias. He even ventured up into Georgia and Alabama and over into Louisiana. He visited nurseries far and wide, sometimes buying out a business’s entire stock in just a few minutes.

Pink Perfection

Alba Plena

Alfred died in 1944. Louise opened the gardens to the public in 1946 and donated them to the state in 1954.

I’m sure I wasn’t even a year old the first time I went to Maclay Gardens. My parents collected camellias, so they liked to visit Maclay quite frequently to get ideas for new varieties they might look for at the nurseries. My father liked to go through the gardens very methodically, admiring each camellia individually. He’d read its name and take a picture of its bloom. As a child, I honestly never thought this was boring. I always liked camellias. And plus, there were other things to do in the gardens while my father was busy with his methodical tour. When I was eight or nine, Kris and I would be doing cartwheels on the lawns or hiding in the secret garden or roller skating down the bumpy brick walk. Of course, we were also taking in the scenery, absorbing it, memorizing the views. I think I got my first idea of beauty at Maclay Gardens, developed my first theories about it there.

I’m so glad that I—an ordinary person—had access to such an extraordinary place. My family could pay a few dollars and pass a whole afternoon strolling the gardens just as if they were our own. It was like spending the day in a world-class museum. Just being in the midst of such beauty and splendor, you felt ennobled, uplifted. Visiting Maclay Gardens is good for the soul.

An early trip to Maclay Gardens (I’m the baby); I’m there with Mom and some North Carolina relatives.

Mom in the gardens again, spring 1992

Sophie and Jake at Maclay, summer 2006

A view of the woods at Lafayette Park

These pictures are from one of my favorite neighborhoods in Tallahassee, the Lafayette Park neighborhood. I went to elementary school in this area, and I have such warm memories of the place.

We used to have end-of-the-year parties at Lafayette Park, which was just a few blocks away from the school. Our class would walk to the park, and I remember I was just fascinated by the bumpy old sidewalks that would take us there. See, we didn’t have sidewalks in the new suburban neighborhood where my family lived; you couldn’t walk anywhere. Sidewalks, to me, were generally the stuff of storybooks. Anyway, we’d have so much fun at our Lafayette Park parties. We’d play softball and run around and have hotdogs and rice krispy treats and popsicles. The park had athletic fields, but it also had vast stretches of shady woods, with trails and bridges and the grandest old trees—pines and sweetgums and live oaks and sparkleberries.

When I was trying to get this picture, I saw a fox zip into its den.

Every tree in the park is special; they’re all distinct individuals.

Palmettos and ferns grow around the bridges, on the edges of the creek bed.

In the summer Kris and I would take really inexpensive art lessons at Lafayette; they were subsidized by the city. I still remember how wonderful and relaxing it was to sit outside on a summer morning and draw the trees. I can remember a certain morning in great detail, exactly how it felt to sit in the dry leaf duff, peacefully drawing roots and bark. Kris and I took lots of different classes—drawing, ceramics, bead making, and painting. We even took a class that focused just on making Christmas decorations. The teachers were always so nice, and the classrooms were sunny and cheerful; they had a very distinct, comforting smell that made me think of brown sugar.

The neighborhood around the park was full of interesting old houses, no two the same. There were limestone retaining walls with ferns dripping down their sides, and great live oaks shaded plenty of messy, lush cottage-style gardens that I longed to explore. As Dad was driving us to school, I’d always try to peer into the gardens, my eyes following the shady paths as far as they could.

The work of a Master Gardener

I just love a swing hanging from a tree.

One time I actually got to play in one of those great yards. Kris had a friend who lived within walking distance of our school, in a romantic old Florida house, white brick with a second-story balcony cooled by ceiling fans and decorated with wicker chairs. It was a Mediterranean-style house, probably built in the 1940s. Kris’s friend was very proud of her yard, which took up a whole block. I remember she called it “the maze” because it was divided into different shady garden rooms, the walls formed by old hollies and camellias and even ginger lilies grown six or seven feet tall. Well, I had a fabulous time the day I got to play in “the maze.” I believe we buried treasure, and made a house under a camellia.

This isn’t Kris’s friend’s house; I tried to get a picture of it, but the gardens were so lush and jungle-y they completely obscured the view.

The Brokaw-McDougall House, built in 1860

Here’s another fond memory I have of the Lafayette Park neighborhood: Sometimes, very rarely, when I was in eighth grade, my friend Kim and I would get to walk over to the kindergarten and babysit the little kids while the teacher was taking her lunch break. The kindergarten was separate from the rest of the school, located across the street in an old Craftsman bungalow. It was a very, very special thing to get to walk to the kindergarten. I just loved the freedom of it, the idea of leaving the school grounds in the middle of the school day. I liked the comfortable feeling of it, too, the sense that rules were being relaxed. Our school was such a friendly, cozy little place, so idyllic. I remember once on the way back to our classroom Kim and I found a big blue hydrangea bush right near the street and we picked our teacher the most beautiful bouquet. The flower clusters were so big, they reminded me of balloons or balls of cotton candy. (And, yes, of course now I see that the flowers were surely in somebody’s yard. . . .)

Anyway, I’m really happy that Lafayette Park still looks the same today as it did years ago when I was in school. The neighborhood is especially magical now, at Halloween time, when the residents go all out decorating, when the lawns become cemeteries, and ghosts made of sheets haunt the mossy trees.

Halloween is a big deal in Lafayette Park.

Everybody’s so creative with their decorating.