At the top of an avenue of hemlocks and pines in Flat Rock, North Carolina, sits an old Victorian cottage with a wide welcoming porch. Past the hydrangeas and pink roses, past the marble nymph sculpture, the plot looks out over serene Highland Lake. It’s all reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, about as classic a mountain retreat as you can muster, and the Charleston, South Carolina, native and artist Marty Whaley Adams Cornwell immediately said yes when she learned it was for sale. She’d grown up summering across the water at the Arts and Crafts–style house her great-grandfather built. “Daddy taught me to swim in this lake,” she says. So when Marty and her first husband bought the 1876 white clapboard beauty and the surrounding twelve acres as an escape from the Lowcountry’s scorch, “it felt like coming home.”
That was in 1984. Four years later, Marty divorced. But she had the ideal family member to join her as both co-owner and coconspirator: the Mrs. Whaley. “I come from a long line of gardeners—my great-grandmother and grandmother were un-believable gardeners, and of course Mama,” she says. Her mother, Emily Whaley, famously wrote Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden, a memoir that pays tribute to the formal green space at 58 Church Street that she tended, designed by the renowned landscape architect Loutrel Briggs.
There, a young Marty had once leafed through her mother’s stacks of seed catalogues. “It was the only way to source plants before there were local nurseries,” she remembers. “Mama would order violas, stock, and snapdragons.” Marty also frequently visited her grandparents in Pinopolis, South Carolina, where she’d walk among the camellias her grandfather nurtured, and see “whatever incredible bouquet my grandmother had just arranged in the foyer, or a wall of sweet peas climbing an old rickety fence—just one beautiful scene after another.”
Until Mrs. Whaley’s death in 1998, the mother-daughter duo turned the Flat Rock property into much more than a reprieve from the heat. Emily painted artworks and wrote on the back porch, while Marty painted on the front porch. A century-old maple anchors one side of the spread, and, in her seventies, Emily dug up the tree’s volunteers and replanted them on the lawn’s edges toward the lake. Today they grow alongside blue hydrangeas propagated from Marty’s older sister’s 1950s wedding bouquet.
Marty herself has transformed the garden into its current abundant state over the past thirty years. Where two massive pines once stood—“struck by lightning when Mama and friends were playing bridge on the porch; about took the hair off her head!”—Marty designed the centerpiece oval pond with elegant statuary from her great-aunt’s historic garden near Charleston. The pond is inspired by the serene pool at 58 Church where Pat Conroy stood for the cover photograph of this magazine’s debut issue in 2007.
“When I sit on this porch and look out at the lilies, at the bees drunk on the monarda, it soothes about any problem,” Marty says, her drawl as thick as the humidity she left behind after moving to Flat Rock full time in 2022. “Just listen to that woodlark; it’s like church.”
In 2023, Marty made the difficult decision to sell her Charleston home and “Mrs. Whaley’s Garden.” It was “the hardest thing; it took me two years to muster the emotional strength,” she says. At the time, her second husband, Charles Cornwell, was sick, and Flat Rock was “where we needed to be,” and where he died the following year. Now the new Church Street owners are restoring both the eighteenth-century house and its famed garden, which thrilled Marty to learn. “Gardening reminds you that everything has a season,” she says. “As Mama would say, ‘A storm blowing through makes room for something new.’”
Now in her sixth decade as an accomplished painter, Marty found that living in the mountains made more space for her art, which includes many floral still lifes. She built a small framing studio just beyond the big maple, using three fabulous windows she “couldn’t pass up” at a local salvage store. In the late summer, she loves gazing at the spot where her son’s partner, the florist Kylie Ammerman, works magic with dahlias. Lately, she’s been spending a lot of time soaking in the views from the studio as she preps for a solo art exhibition in October at Flat Rock’s Marsha Hammel Studio.
A sign on the Church Street gate asked visitors to “invite your soul to rest.” No such sign is needed in Flat Rock. As bluebirds alight on feeders and hummingbirds and butterflies flit around the zinnias, the soul and the imagination can’t help but feel nourished. “A garden is like a painting: Stir a little here, mix a little color there,” Marty says. “Things practically grow themselves here. They just take off.” She points to a thriving variegated Solomon’s seal, a fall-blooming anemone, and a robust hive of deep ruby bee balm gracing the side of the porch. “It’s just so miraculous, to plant moonflowers from seed and watch them come up. I mean, how could I not be a gardener?”
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