Beneath the twisted branches of an ancient live oak, standing in a bed of caladiums and white impatiens, Virginia Dare gazes past me toward the Sunken Garden. I wonder at her expression, which is solemn. No — serene. She is, I think, North Carolina’s own Mona Lisa. The sculpture, chiseled out of Carrara marble by Maria Louise Lander in 1859, imagines the first English child born in America as a young woman — had she grown up.

Fort Raleigh abuts Elizabethan Gardens and draws visitors with a re-created earthwork where an English military fort once stood.  photograph by Chris Hannant

Just east of here, an earthwork outlines the location of the military fort built by the first English settlers, who arrived in 1587. More than 100 men, women, and children were led by explorer John White on an expedition to establish the first permanent English colony in the New World. This is where the group lived … and where they disappeared with hardly a trace.

Along U.S. Highway 64 on Roanoke Island, sandwiched between Croatan and Roanoke sounds, marooned between the mainland and the Outer Banks, I’ve encountered both history and mystery, plus a path through time.

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The Elizabethan Gardens, a nonprofit located within Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, was originally intended to be a modest, two-acre English garden that a colonist might have built on Roanoke Island if the settlement had succeeded — a permanent memorial to the lost. But by the time it opened in 1960, the scope and design had become much more elaborate than planned.

Today, the gardens stretch across 10 acres, bloom year-round, and contain more than 500 species of plants: fiery canna lilies and azaleas, delicate angel’s trumpets and dazzling clusters of star-shaped pentas, enormous evergreen camellias and mazes of colorful annuals. Manager Dan Hossack knows it all better than anyone. He’s passionate about the garden’s variety, effusive about the relationship it showcases between old trees and new displays, native plants and formal installations.

Elizabethan Gardens is home to 500 species of plants, such as lacecap hydrangeas. photograph by Chris Hannant

“The plants tell a story,” he says. “To go from two tidy acres to this — you can really see the trends throughout the years. You can trace them based on who planted what. Like, oh my God, that plant came out in the ’70s and was super popular, and they planted a whole bunch of them. There are whole chunks of time where you can see different personalities and plants that came along.”

Strolling through the Sunken Garden, I’m struck by the handmade-brick walkway, the precise yaupon holly hedges, and the ancient Italian fountain, which predates the garden’s namesake, Queen Elizabeth I. But the thing I’m most in awe of is the pink-blossomed crape myrtles, a tree that I have in spades in my own yard. They’re exquisitely trained in a way I’ve never seen. “They’re like little statues,” Hossack says. “There’s a deep historical context. Training trees, topiaries — that was in vogue [in 16th-century England]. Everyone was trying to impress the queen.”

By the time I reach The Queen’s Rose Garden — which, fittingly, features a rose sent by Queen Elizabeth II from Windsor Castle’s royal rose garden — I’m quite literally frolicking through the Elizabethan Gardens. I get the sense that Hossack would frolic, too … if he were ever finished trimming and raking and weeding and building.

The Virginia Dare statue envisions the first English child born in the New World as a young woman.  photograph by Chris Hannant

“It’s like how you’re never done painting the Golden Gate Bridge; by the time you’re finished, you just have to start over,” he says. “But there’s something really poetic about chasing something ephemeral like nature.”

Back at the feet of Virginia Dare, I’m moved by how tangible history feels here. Just down a mossy path stands another ancient live oak — one that’s believed to have been here since 1585. When colonists first set foot on shore. When Virginia Dare was born.

“I think she’s a historical touchstone for visitors,” Hossack says. “She was a real demarcation between England and the colonies. She’s a reminder that a woman really was pregnant and gave birth to a child — maybe right over there, somewhere in these very woods.”

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Later, on a path that winds through a maritime forest at Fort Raleigh, I walk beneath towering loblolly pines and more live oaks draped in Spanish moss, thinking on Hossack’s words. The earthwork, the nearby excavation sites of previous archaeological digs, and artifacts like tin-glazed earthenware fragments, fired brick, and a copper necklace make the past visible. But it’s the North Carolina landscape itself — the live oaks, the shoreline, the crape myrtles — that brings all this to life in a way that visitors can truly experience and understand. On Roanoke Island, history is not abstract, its edges blurred and evidence lost to time, but visceral.

Fort Raleigh and the Elizabethan Gardens are bookends to a mystery: At the fort, we glimpse the lives of the lost colonists and their brief time here. In the gardens, we imagine what they might have done had they stayed and thrived. We dream of who they might have become.

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site
1401 National Park Drive
Manteo, NC 27954
nps.gov/fora
elizabethangardens.org

More to Explore: Venture into downtown Manteo and explore more of Roanoke Island by visiting ourstate.com/manteo.