Bunny Lloyd created herJames Isl oasis with help from a host of green-thumbed neighbors
Carolyn “Bunny” Lloyd will give you the sense that beautiful things happen by magic in her James Island garden. She’ll tell you about the ‘New Dawn’ rose that sprang miraculously back to life, the beautyberry bush that grew seven feet up a palm tree trunk, and the monarch butterfly expert who materialized to chase her resident swarm. “Now can you believe that?” she’ll exclaim, pointing to the latest miracle—an elephant ear that planted itself in an ideal corner, for instance. “I am a lucky woman!”
But Bunny’s habit of giving nature the credit for every happy accident—and her contagious wonderment at the results—belies years of compost-shoveling, planting, and replanting that she’s put into this green space. Learning along the way, she’s DIY’d most of it, with the help of some generous gardener friends. And now she’s more dedicated than ever to making it a haven for pollinators, such as birds, bees, and butterflies.
Really, the story starts out in disaster. In 1989, Bunny, her husband, Rich, and their young son and daughter moved into their home that overlooks Charleston Harbor in front and salt marsh in back. Five months later, Hurricane Hugo hit, wiping their landscape of pine and oak trees practically clean. During those early years, Bunny was busy raising kids and working for the family business, Lloyd’s Soccer, which outfits many local teams. “It was all I could do to get grass and foundation plants in,” she says.
In Bunny Lloyd’s James Island backyard, ‘Powis Castle’ artemisia shines against white ruellia, while butterfly pea climbs the archway toward giant elephant ear, inviting visitors into a bloom-lined path-cum-hummingbird highway.
But as luck (or magic) would have it, Bunny’s best friend, Mary Jane Ogawa, was happily honing her green thumb. “I’d come home from work, and there would be plants sitting on my steps—three lilies of the Nile one day, a gorgeous rose another,” Bunny recalls. “Mary Jane would call and tell me exactly where I needed to plant them.”
When the Lloyds added a backyard pool around 2000, it was Mary Jane who suggested they build a brick planter along one side of their open-air pool house. “I thought that was so clever,” says Bunny, who found that she loved filling this new real estate with flowering annuals and coleus.
Meanwhile, pastry chefs Jim Smeal and Alejandro González had moved in down the street. Striking up a friendship, Bunny discovered that they were growing a tropical paradise. “I had never seen a garden like that in my life. I was so in awe of it: their elephant ears, the big bed of foxtail ferns, the most beautiful area of farfugium,” Bunny recalls. “I’d say, ‘Ooh, I love that,’ and next thing I know, a bromeliad would appear in my garden.”
Bunny dug into a couple beds in her backyard, then tackled her home’s front landscape, which had long bored her with its straight-shot sidewalk and endless centipede grass. At the foot of the front steps, the Lloyds added twin pads of concrete to create sitting areas that Bunny would surround with palms and grasses—always swaying in the harbor breeze—and blooms like white gaura and lantana that speak to the house’s ivory exterior.
At the end of the walkway, they built low brick pillars for the express purpose of elevating rabbit statues. “I got my nickname because I was born on Easter,” explains Bunny. “It’s my favorite holiday, and I’ve always just loved rabbits.”
In 2011, she retired after a late-career stint in the front office of the O’Quinn School on James Island. That, she says, is when gardening went from hobby to addiction. “I started to wake up in the night thinking about what I was going to plant the next day.”
The Lloyds’ house is nestled into a curve in the road—one frequently traveled by neighbors walking to Sunrise Park or the James Island Yacht Club. So for Bunny, it was important to create an eye-catching show along the side of her property. Tired of planting “flower after flower” in front of her white picket fence, she called Alejandro and Jim over, and the trio designed a bed that’s low-maintenance yet packs a punch year-round.
At the center, a chaste tree rises from a skirt of chartreuse elephant ears and variegated schefflera—both chosen for their stunning effect against the tree’s purple blooms. On either side, intentionally off-kilter arrangements of ‘Sunshine’ ligustrum shrubs pop against the burgundy backdrop of ‘Princess Caroline’ fountain grasses. “Everybody comes by and says ‘Wow!’ because of the dramatic contrast in colors,” notes Bunny. “And all I have to do is a little pruning and weeding.”
Step through the iron gates and into the backyard, and the vibe changes from public display to personal haven. An enormous three-tiered deck—proof of the Lloyds’ preference for living outside rather than in—leads from the house down to the free-form pool that’s wrapped in beds of palms, lilies, and grasses. Bromeliads erupt from colorful planters, and Bunny’s pride-and-joy plumeria trees fragrance the air come summer.
With poor soil, the bed near the marsh is tricky, says Bunny, but azaleas, giant liriope, fatsia, and star jasmine create a pretty swinging spot for visiting granddaughters.
A U-shaped driveway curves through the foreground, cutting out a semicircle of earth that Bunny has turned into her own tropical island. A pair of Sylvester palms tower above groves of cannas, elephant ears, and angel’s trumpets that hang like fanciful light fixtures over masses of dinner plate hibiscus, milkweed, and Platinum Beauty lomandra. A ground layer of daylilies and dwarf morning glory leaves hardly an inch of earth bare.
As she expanded the bed, cutting out more and more of the original turf grass, Bunny realized she needed to carve a “working path” through its center. She pulled stepping stones from around her property and added two archway trellises that she planted with purple hyacinth bean and butterfly pea. “I love that I get different views from the inside of this garden than I do from the outside,” says Bunny. “I’ll be walking down this path, and hummingbirds are just zooming all around me.”
Over the last decade, Bunny has become enthralled with planting for “the three Bs,” as she calls them: birds, bees, and butterflies. She started out by putting in some milkweed for the monarchs and pretty soon was pouring over Birds & Blooms magazine and adding pollinator-magnets like Turk’s cap, gomphrena, and salvia. “It makes me so happy to see the three Bs in my garden—to know I have created something that benefits them,” Bunny says.
One summer day, she looked out her window to see a man with a butterfly net pacing through the backyard. It was South Carolina monarch researcher Billy McCord, who’d happened past the Lloyds’ garden, seen the kaleidoscope of butterflies, and set to work tagging them. Did he mind that it was someone’s private space? “Not one bit,” exclaims Bunny, “and neither did I!”
As far as Bunny is concerned, the community forged among gardeners—and the community created within gardens themselves—is as important as the plants. Jim and Alejandro come by often to talk shop. Bunny and another neighbor, Karen Salinaro, couple up for Charleston Horticultural Society events and plant-shopping adventures. The Lloyds’ kids and grandkids make a tradition of watching the Masters Tournament on the deck each April and hunting for Easter eggs among the season’s new blooms.
And if a passerby stops to tell Bunny they love one of her plants, “I bring out my shovel and give them a clump,” she says. “I’m always delighted to do it, because so much of my garden was shared by other kind folks.” For her, it’s all part of the magic.
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