Brookgreen Gardens Adds an Indoor Option for Rain and Heat

If you have held a Brookgreen membership for more than a few years, you already know the unspoken math of visiting. Go in the morning during summer, before the humidity turns the Live Oak Allee into a sauna. Skip it entirely if rain is in the forecast, because there was nowhere indoors to wait it out. Go in winter only if you can layer up, because the gardens themselves are the whole experience and there was no real shelter from a raw January wind coming off the Waccamaw.

That math just changed. Brookgreen Gardens spent 35 years planning a single building that solves both problems at once, and it opened its doors this past January a few miles outside Murrells Inlet on Highway 17.

Thirty-Five Years in the Making

The Purdy Welcome Center and Conservatory Gardens had its ribbon cutting on January 12, 2026, and more than 500 people showed up for it, according to the Post and Courier's coverage of the event. That is not a small crowd for a Monday morning garden opening, and it tells you something about how long this had been anticipated.

Brookgreen's president and CEO, Page Kiniry, told the paper the plans for what became the Purdy Center had been in the works for 35 years. Ed Zeigler, the Greenville architect who worked on Brookgreen's original masterplan decades ago, was part of the team that finally got it built. Back then the plan called for a large glass conservatory, but the board's thinking about how to use the space shifted over time until it became what it is now: a year-round, multipurpose front door for the entire 9,100-acre property.

The $18 million building is named for Verl and Sandra Purdy, honorary trustees who split their time between Charlotte and the Peninsula at Inlet Point South in Litchfield. The couple got married at Brookgreen years ago in a small, quiet ceremony, and they told the paper they hope their own grandchildren might get married inside the new center someday.

What The Weather Used To Decide

Here is the part that actually changes how a local visit works. The heart of the Purdy Center is the Conservatory Great Hall, a climate-controlled indoor garden holding roughly 3,000 plants, according to Brookgreen's own marketing team. Skylights, clerestory windows, and accordion doors open the room onto an outdoor courtyard, so the space can flex between a sealed winter refuge and an open-air summer pavilion depending on the day.

Kiniry told the Post and Courier she expects visitor numbers to grow in both the cold winter months and on the extremely hot summer days now that Brookgreen has an indoor facility to offer. That is a specific, testable claim about how the calendar itself is expected to shift, not just a ribbon-cutting talking point.

Outside the Great Hall, the Conservatory Veranda carries its own bit of history. Its elevated terrace uses a Kalwall shade cut in the shape of butterfly wings, a direct nod to Anna Hyatt Huntington's original 1930s garden design. The Purdy Center also brought new sculpture into the collection specifically for this space, including Gaia by Dora Natella, CEO by Glenna Goodacre, and Heron by Babette Bloch. Twelve pieces from Paul Manship's 1932 Bird Series, part of the Brookgreen collection since 1935, are on display together in the Great Hall for the first time since Brookgreen acquired them.

None of that required good weather to enjoy. That is the point.

The Monthly Ritual Got a Permanent Address

The Purdy Center was the largest piece of a broader initiative Brookgreen calls the Campaign for the Next Generation, and the campaign wrapped this year across four areas: the Conservatory and Welcome Center, new art facilities, expanded Lowcountry history exhibits, and a new habitat in the Lowcountry Zoo.

The art facilities piece is the Simpson Art Center, a roughly 4,000-square-foot sculpture studio and conservation lab built to support clay, wax, plaster, resin, 3D printing, and direct stone carving. It is now the permanent home for Open Studios, Brookgreen's long-running monthly program where visitors watch a working sculptor move a piece from clay to bronze and ask questions along the way. The remaining 2026 dates are:

• Wednesday, September 23
• Wednesday, October 14
• Wednesday, November 18

Each session runs from 10 a.m. to noon and is included with garden admission. Yoga in the Gardens has also relocated, moving to the new Leonard Pavilion as of May, and the fourth-Saturday Walk With a Doc program, a partnership with Tidelands Health that pairs a short talk from a Tidelands physician with a mile-long walk on Brookgreen's paths, continues on its usual schedule. These are not new attractions built to lure a one-time visitor. They are existing local routines that finally got a real building to live in.

This Particular September

If you have not been back since the spring rush, this month has already brought two events worth noting. Brookgreen held its 9th annual Gullah Geechee Junkanoo Festival, drawing on Bahamian Junkanoo tradition to celebrate the cultural connections of the African Diaspora and the living heritage of the Gullah Geechee people through music, dance, storytelling, and food. The Regal Threads exhibition, the 19th annual African American Fiber Art showcase presented as part of the 2026 North Charleston Arts Fest, held its curator talk the same day, walking visitors through a collection of art quilts and textile work built around blue and purple palettes.

The next one is still ahead of you. This coming Saturday, September 19, the Fall Plant Sale takes over the Brookgreen Arboretum from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a plant list posted online a few days ahead on September 15. Most of what is for sale is Brookgreen Grown, propagated on site by the same horticulture team that maintains the gardens, and staff horticulturists are on hand to talk through what will actually survive a Grand Strand yard. Four days after that, Open Studios returns to the Simpson Art Center on Wednesday, September 23, from 10 a.m. to noon.

Layer onto all of that the National Sculpture Society's annual awards exhibition, which returns to Brookgreen each year with work from established and emerging American sculptors and lets visitors vote for a People's Choice Award. That is a working fall calendar, not a single grand opening that fades from the conversation by spring.

What Actually Changed

The easy read on the Purdy Center is that Brookgreen added another pretty room. The more accurate read is that it removed the two variables that used to run a local member's calendar: heat and rain. A membership that used to get used in short, weather-dependent bursts now has a reason to become a habit again, whether that means ducking into the Great Hall on a July afternoon or catching Open Studios in the Simpson Art Center on a gray November Wednesday.

That kind of institutional patience, a plan that sat for 35 years before the board found the right version of it, tracks with what makes Murrells Inlet itself feel different from a lot of coastal towns its size. The people who fund these projects, like the Purdys, are part of that long view, which eventually shows up in the built environment.

I spend a lot of my own time thinking about what makes a house or a garden or a town worth returning to more than once, and Brookgreen's answer this year is a good one: build the room that removes the excuse.

If you are weighing what makes daily life in Murrells Inlet different from the postcard version, I would rather talk it through over coffee than over a listing sheet. Reach out to Michelle Schneider and let's connect.