The plan was to meet Walter Hood at the Scarpa Garden in the Central Pavilion. But when he arrived, and as we gazed from the doorway into the crowded little courtyard transformed with scaled-up versions of his basket-weave pavilions, we instead decided to walk over to the installation. But that, too, was a popular spot, so Hood, the landscape architect whose firm is based in Oakland, California, began to speak to the group of us gathered, his backdrop a historical timeline of Phillips, a 405-hectare rural agricultural settlement in South Carolina. It was once a plantation; in the 1870s, those who were formerly enslaved there, now freedmen, purchased 10-acre parcels and founded the Phillips Community. And Hood marvelled at the beautiful logic by which the people — known as the Gullah Geechee — apportioned their land. They would gain recognition for the baskets they weaved from native sweetgrass: the stuff growing free and rampant along a rural edge of water, the “overgrown” that fades out into nothingness in the maps of 18th-century cartographer William de Brahm.
Yet more recent history would see the settlement boxed in by suburban development. “They wanted to ram a six-lane road through,” Hood explained, “so we came up with a plan to help them fight the road and that helped them also become a historic district.” Now that he has worked with the people to protect Phillips from further encroachment, Hood is proposing something called an Arts Lifeway — a network of pavilions along Route 1, the path where craftspeople have long made and sold
