One more Stewartia.

There are nice geometric perennial plantings...

Anybody recognize this fuzzy pink Salvia?

The monkey puzzle that died in 2017, once the furthest north on the east coast with any size, has been replanted...twice for good measure? Not sure this is a good idea...at least this close together!

This northernmost known redwood on the east coast is looking good:

Although, I'm a little concerned about letting the crown start to fork like that...it probably lost a leader in a cold spell. With their vast financial resources I would have gotten a boom truck in there a few years ago to correct that.

This lepidote rhododendron got confused by the very dry, cool August followed by a wetter September, and started blooming.

In closing, it's good to see some relatively recent planting of rarities, like an Emmenopterys henryi. Hopefully this one will be blooming soon.

And this is one of the biggest Horse Chestnuts I've seen, even comparable to the ones in Paris!

Overall, I'm going to go with

THREE OUT OF FOUR stars.

In some cases they need a little more thoughtful plant management. We see, for example, the same issues with too dense planting that affects the Coker Arboretum, and to a lesser degree, the NCSU Arboretum. But overall this garden is known for rare specimen plantings and they seem to have managed to keep almost all of them alive through a period of upheaval in the garden's history.

Here's the pic of a tag being eaten by a tree..

not sure why it failed to post above.

And one more important specimen tree I forgot to post. Look at this Lacebark Pine!

Thanks for the report. Impressive coast redwood! Has to have seen some near 0 F temps given its size. And correct about longleaf pine -- mine's sacrificing lower limbs that get just partial shade. My pond cypresses' foliage initially wasn't too sparse, but gotten increasingly so over the years and they've both suffered from this yrs' drought by turning early (nearby baldcypresses are unaffected). Looks like some inosculation on the lacebark pine....

Beautiful!

The mansion really gives it that charm of yesteryears home and garden albeit a bit overgrown.

Some fairly rare specimens there?

Thanks for posting.

Ben...yeah...the lacebark pine had some rot but was hanging in there. It's funny that as I visit gardens like this, I'm starting to realize that, assuming I somehow live another 50 years (genetically possible, although what will be become of the world by then is a very, very big question mark...) my 'well grown' plants might all be 'boring' looking in 2075. I'm keeping my lacebark pines to one trunk, and it won't be the crazy curved ones that this developed, probably because it spent decades trying to escape the local canopy and reach more light!!! But I'm ok w/that. I've seen so many damaged lacebark pines from letting them have multiple trunks...OTOH, quite a few of the ones in Asian temples actually have more or less singular and more or less straight trunks. So instead of the philosophy "the more trunks the merrier" because you get more bark, I'm just going to have 3 single trunked lacebark pines in different parts of my garden. 🤣

"Some fairly rare specimens there?" - yes, but, other than the perhaps dubious replanting of the monkey puzzles, what often happens with these sort of gardens is now that the original creators are gone, there doesn't seem to be a lot of new planting of rarities. Other than the Emmenopterys, and a couple unmarked but Gresham-y lookin' magnolias, nothing 'new and notably rare' seems to have been planted in the past 20 years. (I won't count the poor longleaf pine because it's never going to form a specimen in that spot) OTOH, at least Longwood, although they aren't breeding new ornamentals anymore* - they are at least planting them.

* - years ago I made a post alluding to the scandalous situation that developed with the Chinese government and Longwood over 10 years ago, involving Camellias. I didn't want to go into any details back then - I didn't even say it involved camellias - because I didn't want to get the people involved 'in trouble' for talking to me, but they have left Longwood. The CN government found out Longwood was breeding an everblooming camellia hybrid using rare Chinese species, and invoked the spirit of the brain dead Nagoya protocols to demand a shakedown and share of any profits from commercialization. (Which, let's not forget, Longwood wouldn't have been obligated to patent/trademark the results...though they probably would have given the money they were spending on it) Long story short, the whole effort had to be canceled and thousands of test crossings were destroyed. I have circumstantial evidence to suggest that other plant hybridization efforts have been quashed by similar "world economic victimization culture peripeteia", but I'll save that digression for another day. The good news is everblooming camellias are being worked on elsewhere, presumably avoiding the mistakes, or etiquette failings, or whatever, that LW made 15 years ago.

So, maybe Longwood's website would claim they are still breeding ornamentals, and maybe they are, but it doesn't feel like the olden times of the 1950s-1980s when they were releasing new cultivars every year or two. At least to me it doesn't.

Here's a more distant view of the Pinus bungeana.

Here's the very non-eccentric looking trunk of my biggest one.

One funny observation I forgot to share. I have seen several huge umbrella pines and never noticed the color of their bark. For some reason, their Sciadopitys, no kidding, has redder bark than the redwood tree!

BTW, that salvia is Salvia oxyphora.