Brookgreen Gardens

We have had the most amazing day today!  We went to a place called Brookgreen Gardens, just south of Myrtle Beach.  It used to belong to a family called Huntington, and Mrs. H was a sculptor.  The property was a very prosperous  rice plantation before the civil war.  There were many in the area, but when they could no longer have slaves, they were unable to grow rice.  The property now belongs to the state I believe, and across Hwy 17 is the rest of the property which is now a state park going to the beach.  We didn't get over there today.

There are 100's of sculptures by pretty well every scupter living or dead.  There's a building which housed over 600, and we didn't even have time to see those.  I'm sure we never saw all the ones outside either.  When I got home and dumped all the pictures into the computer, even after deleting some from the camera, I found there were 345 pictures to deal with.  :-(  I have been working on them all evening, and got them down to 176.  Don't worry, they're not all here!   This is the biggest one there, made of granite.

This is one of my favorites.  They all had signs saying what they were and who had done them and when, but I couldn't possibley remember them.

This was a typical sign, in this case being share by a gecko.

A family of timber wolves.

There was also a bit of a zoo, with birds and animals from this area.  We discovered that this green stuff on the water is not algae, but something called duckweed.

This is a cattle egret.

We saw a yellow crowned night heron in Hilton Head, but this one is a black crowned night heron.

Ibises.

This fellow was blowing out his throat - I'm not sure why they do that sometimes.

There was a mom and 3 "baby" otters.

None of the alligators showed themselves in the zoo area - only this sculpture.

But we did see one in the wild on the edge of the property later.

There were red foxes and gray foxes in a large enclosure.  This is a gray one - they climb trees!

The eagles are so beautiful!  Fortunately, there was a hole big enough to stick the lens of the camera through.

I think this is a barred owl.

Two red-tailed hawks.

This is one of my favorite sculptures.

There were lots of these funny little squirrels around - a southern fox squirrel - actually, they are bigger than a normal squirrel.

I just really like this picture.

This afternoon, we went for a 45 minute guided tour on this pontoon boat.  It went on a tidal creek, which had been used to flood the rice fields.

Another picture that I really like.

Isn't this adorable?

This hawk just flew into a tree as we were leaving - he's not in an enclosure.

A cute group of "kids" saluting as the flag is raised.

This is at the road entrance to the gardens.

Well, I hope I haven't bored you to tears.  Thanks for looking.  I'm off to bed!