Èze, France — 2011

My first experience happened almost accidentally.

Shortly after I was widowed, I joined a mastermind group that would meet by phone for a year, with gatherings in Aspen, Middleton Place and Monaco.

Monaco! I never would have guessed that would be my first European destination.

Then Kris, my best friend, decided to gather a few girlfriends in Provence at the same time. She would rent a car in Nice, we would all stop for a few days in Èze, and then she would deliver me to my hotel in Monaco before continuing to their country house.

Kris was exactly the confident—Drive into Monaco? Of course we can!—friend I needed.

Èze is a medieval village clinging to a cliff between Nice and Monaco. Its narrow stone streets climb toward the Jardin Exotique d'Èze, where cacti and succulents grow among sculptures high above the Mediterranean.

We had explored the garden the day before. The next morning, Kris and I carried coffee and croissants onto a balcony at Château Eza, a hotel within a centuries-old castle, and pulled out our sketchbooks.

It was the first trip on which I had ever kept a travel sketchbook.

Kris faced the Mediterranean far below us. I faced one of Jean-Philippe Richard's serene female sculptures rising from the garden well above our balcony.

Technically, I wasn't inside the garden. But from our balcony I could see no one else in it. There was only the rugged hillside, the sea, my coffee and this strong, graceful stone woman watching over the coast.

I kept sketching after that trip.

Staying overnight gave us another gift. Early in the morning, before the tour buses arrived, Èze itself was nearly empty. We could wander its medieval passageways, notice the old stones and, for a little while, pretend we lived there.

That was probably when I first learned the travel trick I have used ever since:

Stay close. Get up early. See the place before the crowd arrives.

Middleton Place, South Carolina — 2011

Middleton Place is one of America's great historic landscapes, with sweeping terraces, geometric vistas and a remarkable collection of camellias.

Its beauty also carries a complicated history. Generations of enslaved Africans and African Americans created and maintained the landscape visitors admire today. The garden was also connected to the international world of plant exploration. French botanist André Michaux was a friend of the Middleton family and brought camellias there in 1786. President James Monroe was hosted at Middleton Place during his Southern tour in 1819.

I happened to visit during camellia season.

Even better, I was staying at the Inn at Middleton Place and discovered that guests could walk from the inn into the gardens.

I set my alarm for sunrise, pulled on a jacket, grabbed my camera and went.

For years I had seen photographs of Middleton Place in landscape-history books. Suddenly those long vistas, clipped forms and sweeping greens were real.

And that morning they seemed to belong entirely to me.

The camellias were blooming.

I saw only one staff member in the distance before eventually heading back to the inn for breakfast.

Later I returned during normal visiting hours and took a tour. That gave me history and context.

But the early walk gave me something else.

It allowed me to encounter the landscape quietly, before anyone told me where to look.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden, England — 2012

Then came the phone call.

“The National Trust has just opened the Priest's House at Sissinghurst for rentals, and we're going. Sissinghurst! You don't have time to think about it. Just say yes.”

Kris had added the detail guaranteed to weaken my resistance:

Late June. The longest days of the year. Peak rose season.

If ever there were a Mastercard moment, this was it.

Say yes now. Figure out how to make it work later.

The three-bedroom Priest's House sits within Sissinghurst Castle Garden, the celebrated garden created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.

We each brought our guys and made the cottage our home for a week.

During the day we explored other English gardens, stopping at roadside stands for cherries. But the real luxury came when Sissinghurst's visitors went home.

Then we stepped outside.

No tour bus. No schedule. No need to hurry.

Late-June daylight seemed almost endless. In the morning I could walk out with coffee. In the evening we wandered through the garden rooms long after the public had departed.

One evening I danced beneath the rose-covered arbor in the White Garden, just Mike and me.

Another day we deliberately stayed “home” to watch visitors experience our garden. We mingled with the crowds and listened to conversations while curious faces peered through the windows of our cottage.

I was traveling with two horticulturists, so I invited the head gardener over for a drink.

She said yes.

We spent the evening talking about gardens.

Mastercard promises priceless moments.

That week it delivered.

Miller House and Garden, Indiana — 2025

Years later, another garden surprised me in an entirely different way.

A 2025 New York Times Style Magazine feature listed 25 gardens its panel believed travelers should see.

Sissinghurst was number one.

Number ten was in Indiana.

Indiana?

One day's drive from home?

I needed to see this.

The Miller House and Garden is in Columbus, Indiana, an extraordinary small city filled with architecture by Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi and others.

At the Miller House, landscape architect Dan Kiley created a garden to complement Saarinen's architecture and Alexander Girard's interiors.

I packed several architectural tours into a very short visit. The Columbus Area Visitors Center called the Miller House staff, who let me join a second bus group—but instead of touring the house again, I was allowed to spend that time outside.

So everyone disappeared indoors.

And I wandered off alone.

I walked beneath the allées, studied Saarinen's house from different angles and moved through a landscape of mature trees, geometry, rhythm and intense green to the river.

There were no great floral borders demanding attention.

That wasn't the point.

The quiet made the structure of the garden more apparent. I could see how Kiley's landscape responded to the architecture.

Again, being alone changed what I noticed.

State Botanical Garden of Georgia, Athens — 2004–2020

But the garden I knew most intimately was the one where I worked.

For sixteen years, the State Botanical Garden of Georgia wasn't simply somewhere I visited.

It was my workplace and, in many ways, my home base.

My job overseeing special events meant plenty of late evenings when I was among the last people to leave. I spent quiet hours setting up concerts in the chapel. I walked through the gardens to settle my nerves before events. I watched new gardens emerge from construction sites and witnessed more than sixty seasons of change.

After the lights went off, I sometimes heard the large conservatory creak as its structure adjusted to the cooling night.

There were weekend mornings when I was alone in my office.

I knew the gate code.

I knew which path sounded best underfoot because crushed brick made a particular crunch.

I knew where to brush my hand across a huge rosemary on a late-afternoon walk, releasing enough scent to revive me better than coffee.

That kind of solitude was different.

I hadn't scored a special hotel room, risen before the tour buses or talked someone into giving me access.

I simply knew the place.

Maybe that's what all these experiences have in common.

They gave me something that can be surprisingly hard to find when we travel—or even in everyday life: time to be still, quiet and alone.

Not lonely. Not waiting for the next thing to happen. Just alone long enough to settle into a place.

That is when I begin to hear the gravel beneath my feet, smell the rosemary as I brush against it, notice the changing light or study the structure of a garden instead of rushing toward its highlights.

A good tour can tell me what I am looking at, reveal the history and personalities that shaped it. A guidebook can tell me what I shouldn't miss.

But sometimes I want a little time before all of that.

Time to wander without a destination. To sit. To sketch. To look at nothing in particular or a a small detail or how plant groupings create symphonies of color and texture. To listen to the birds, wind, water. 

To be quiet enough for a garden to reveal itself.