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By Cindy La Ferle Photography by Johnny Quirin My lifelong fascination with Japanese gardens took root when I was a young girl, though I didn’t plant...

Unrolling through some of Michigan’s most scenic places, regional wooden planks make enchanting summer dates and compelling autumn adventures.

Muskegon. In 1857, when New Yorker Wesley Wood stopped in Muskegon, he discovered a seemingly lawless frontier community. Although “saloons, dram shops and gambling places abounded,” Wood “very firmly” believed Muskegon was destined to become “a very important” business and population center. He was right. As present-day Muskegon transitions into a high-tech manufacturing, tourism, healthcare and maritime-based economy, this history-steeped city is also home to a winter sports complex, state-of-the-art planetarium, trolley rides, state parks, the Lake Express and assorted thrills at Michigan’s Adventure.

Manistee. Deriving its name from an Ojibwe word meaning either “river with islands at its mouth” or “spirit of the woods,” Manistee owes its growth to logging, farming and the railroad. Starting out with just a population of about 200 in 1852, the burgeoning port became home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the U.S. during the 1880s. 

Port Huron. Stretching for seven miles along the shore of the St. Clair River and the base of Lake Huron, the City of Port Huron serves as an international border crossing marked by the sweeping twin Blue Water Bridges connecting Michigan to Ontario. 

Menominee. Nestled in a triangle form­­ed by 110-mile-long Green Bay and the Menominee River — the boundary line between Michigan and Wisconsin — Menominee served for a time during the 1870s as a great lumber port.

Bay City. Nourished by Saginaw Bay’s bounty of freshwater rivers and streams, dense forests of white pine, oak, elm and other species once blanketed the Saginaw Valley, where Native Americans including the Chippewa, Ottawa, Ojibway, Hopewell and Potawatomi settled first along the Saginaw River.

Catapulted by an ever-rising number of cultivators investing in land, planting popular varieties and attempting to make a go of it, this artisan crop has become de rigeur in the Great Lakes State.

Towering Gewürztraminer vines create a lush outdoor room around a vineyard table in the midst of Leelanau Peninsula’s wine region, where four couples carry on a spirited conversation near a classic red barn. Here, vintner Tony Ciccone is holding court in an unexpected way. Normally there to tend or harvest the wine grapes, he’s now sitting among them, readying for the evening’s first toast.

Whether your taste tends to the natural and rustic, more formal or somewhere in between, there are many ways to transform the pathway that gets you to the lake, pond or stream you love into one that provides you with your own blessed release from care and worry.