Elizabethan Gardens

The Garden Club of North Carolina built this place in 1960 as a living memorial to the English colonists who came ashore on Roanoke Island between 1584 and 1587 and never came back out. It sits within the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site — the actual ground where Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to colonize the New World under Queen Elizabeth I began and ended. The gardens are a private nonprofit, formally styled after the Elizabethan period, with a waterfront setting on Roanoke Sound. Go because the history underneath it is real.