GPOD on the Road: The Famous Trees of Vancouver Island

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When tapped to design a series of planters for our2024 Idea House in the Kiawah River community on Johns Island, South Carolina, plant pro Steph Green of Contained Creations in Richmond, Virginia, knew exactly what the waterfront property needed. “We wanted to create the most beautiful and biggest statement container gardens, but they needed to be durable and last a long time with minimal upkeep,” says Green. “That’s why picking evergreens or really tough perennials from the Southern Living Plant Collection was kind of the launching point for each individual design.”

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IKEA

For our 2024 Idea House in the Kiawah River community on Johns Island, South Carolina, the natural surroundings proved a generous source of inspiration. This was especially true of the landscape design, notes Scott Parker, the project’s landscape architect and co-founder of Charleston-based DesignWorks. “One of the things that we wanted to do with the landscape and the garden design was really to ground it in the DNA of the Lowcountry,” he says. That meant tailoring their plant selections to mimic the maritime forest that covers parts of the property, as well as choosing more formal ones to reflect Charleston’s long-standing garden traditions.

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“Impossibly unaffordable” are two words that Californians are probably less than thrilled to hear. In a recent report from Chapman University in Orange, California, and the Frontier Centre of Public Policy (FCPP) in Canada, that’s exactly how four California metros are described. The 2024 edition of Demographia International Housing Affordability shows San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego listed among the top 10 least affordable housing markets—not just in the United States, but worldwide. 

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Growing up in the Lowcountry, Drew English, High Hampton’s head gardener, was a hobbyist gardener well-versed in the plants that thrive in South Carolina's long and humid summers. But, as many hot weather residents do, English began to spend more time escaping to the cooler temperatures of the mountains.

Even though pineapples are considered a fruit (and a fruit generally comes from trees—unless it’s a berry), pineapples actually grow on a plant close to the ground. Each pineapple plant bears exactly one pineapple. So where did pineapple come from in the first place?

Over the past few years, Pamela Anderson has had more time to contemplate life. That is, until things kicked into high gear again—but more on that later. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, she moved from France, sold her house in Malibu, and headed north to the small town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where she was born and raised. She hunkered down with her two grown sons, Brandon and Dylan. She bought her grandmother’s old motel, renovated it, and set up her parents there. A lifelong cook, she perfected her baking skills. She reclaimed and expanded her grandfather’s garden on the same land where she had run barefoot as a self-described wild child. It’s the site of both her greatest childhood joys and harrowing traumas, which she describes candidly in her 2023 autobiography, Love, Pamela, and Netflix documentary, Pamela, A Love Story. Almost poetically, for Pamela has journaled and written poetry her whole life, she has reclaimed her true self and her youthful creativity on the exact spot where they were born. When I had the chance to sit with her and talk over Zoom recently, our conversation quickly moved beyond her new cookbook, I Love You (due out in October), to all aspects of life—and her ability to find the deepest of meanings in even the tiniest of seeds.