On Wednesday everyone wanted to go to the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo. Here's Good Queen Bess herself looking like neither Cate Blanchet nor Bette Davis.
The gardens were started about 50 years ago by the Garden Society of North Carolina. Much of the statuary was acquired in the postwar UK when wartime deprivations and socialism forced the gentry to liquidate many estates.
The exception is the statue of Virginia Dare seen below. It was sculpted by a woman artist about 100 years ago and has quite a story. It was originally created in Italy and changed hands several times including being lost in a shipwreck in passage to the US. It was in the North Carolina state historical society for a long time until someone got the bright idea to place it here. It's a fitting place so near the lost colony of Roanoke. (For more click here. This is a romantic interpretation of Virginia Dare who most likely did not survive to adulthood.)
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