Charleston’s South of Broad neighborhood doesn’t reveal itself all at once. It unfolds slowly — down cobblestone lanes, past pastel-painted facades, through gates that hint at what lies beyond. On a warm summer afternoon, I joined Mary T of The Itinerant Gardener for our second tour together, and this particular garden made the case, quietly but convincingly, that true elegance is almost always rooted in restraint.

The home itself set the tone: a charming two-story brick with a generous double porch on the back that seemed designed for nothing more urgent than a glass of something cold and a long look at the garden below. And that garden delivered. A private courtyard unfolded beneath the porch — proper and structured, anchored by wintergreen boxwoods and Pringles dwarf podocarpus clipped into tidy, considered form. It was the kind of bones that give a garden its permanence.

But it wasn’t all structure. An arch draped in bergia vine and cross vine brought a softness to the space, the bergia’s gorgeous blue blooms threading through alongside the cross vine in a combination that stopped me in my tracks. And tucked throughout, white caladiums — luminous and cool — caught the light in that particular way white things do in a Southern summer garden, making everything around them feel a little more alive.

What struck me most wasn’t any single plant or design decision, but the feeling the whole space created — ordered without being stiff, lush without being wild. It had that quality the best Southern gardens always have: the sense that it has always looked exactly like this, and always will.

A visit with Mary T has a way of slowing you down and making you see. This one was no exception.

For a closer look at this garden, catch the tour on Instagram — and if this one spoke to you, I have a feeling you’ll find yourself equally smitten with this tour of a stately home and its formal gardens that are nothing short of swoon-worthy.