Hershey Gardens Turns 75
March 27th, 2012
Hershey Gardens opens for the season this coming Saturday (March 31), and it’s a milestone year for our area’s only botanical garden.
Tulips in Hershey Gardens.
2012 marks the 75th year since chocolate icon Milton Hershey decided to build a “nice garden of roses” on the hillside just below Hotel Hershey (and now overlooking Hersheypark).
I’m always surprised at how few locals seem to make their way over to this gem that chocolate built. I think it’s one of those things where we mark if off the been-there, done-that list and forget about it.
This would be a good year to get there at least once or twice – especially if you haven’t seen Hershey Gardens lately. A new theme garden is in the works, and some special activities are planned around the 75th anniversary.
Few people realize these days what a big deal Hershey Gardens once was.
Within a year after Mr. Hershey (as he’s still reverently known) decided to invest in a public garden in 1936, more than 12,000 rose bushes were planted over the original 3½ acres.
It was such a hit that he soon added trees, tulips, huge annual flower beds and tens of thousands more roses. By the 1940s, the place had upwards of 40,000 rose bushes, had grown to 23 acres and was attracting as many as 25,000 visitors in a single day.
Flower fanciers came from all over by the bus load. Locals drove their Chryslers and Packards through the place. (It was free admission back then.) The “Hershey Rose Garden,” as it was known then, quickly gained a national and even international reputation.
I recently interviewed Leone Gerberich, who worked at the gardens for 40 years, and he said people would come in spring to see the massive display of tulips, then come back in June to see the world-class rose collection, then come back in summer to see the beds full of annuals. (More on that interview in my column this Thursday, March 29, in The Patriot-News.)
That’s still the rotation Hershey Gardens follows to this day.
Every fall, the staff and its some 190 volunteers plant 45,000 new tulip bulbs. Some of them are already blooming due to the early warm spell.
Hershey Gardens' rose beds today.
By the time the bulbs are winding down, the 5,500 remaining rose bushes head into peak bloom in June. That’s well under the original number of roses but still nothing to sneeze at (unless you’re allergic to roses).
When the tulips peter out for the season, they get yanked and replaced with all sorts of summer-blooming annuals – arranged by color. (Most tulips give only a 1-year reliable peak show, which is why most public gardens treat them as fall-planted, spring-blooming annuals.)
All of the salvias, celosias, begonias, petunias, zinnias and such look great from June till frost, when some of them are, in turn, yanked to make way for mums.
While the tulips, roses and annuals are the three stars of the show, Hershey Gardens also is a great place to check out shrubs and perennials that make good choices for our home landscapes.
Hershey Rose Garden the way it looked in 1942.
After all, this is the same climate and soil we’ve got, so the varieties that are doing well at Hershey are ones likely to do well for you. By the time you’re done walking the Gardens’ 23 acres, you’ll encounter just about every good plant that’s garden-worthy around here.
Two other main attractions beyond those:
1.) The Children’s Garden and accompanying Butterfly House. The Children’s Garden is a 1-acre garden within the Gardens that’s fun, action-packed and filled with interesting plants like curly beans and ornamental onions with flower balls that look like exploding stars. The Butterfly House opens for the season May 25 and features nearly three dozen species of butterflies.
2.) The trees. A lot of stately and unusual tree varieties were planted back in the 1930s and 1940s, and many of them have now grown into some of the biggest, oldest examples of their species in Pennsylvania. I especially like the dawn redwoods, the weeping beech with an arbor that you walk under and the many Japanese maples.
Hershey Gardens switched to the theme-garden concept in 1979. You’ll find 10 current themes: the Bill Bowman Garden, Children’s Garden, Herb Garden, High Point Garden (old garden roses from the Hersheys’ home), Rose Gardens, Japanese Garden, Ornamental Grass Garden, Perennial Garden, Rock Garden (including conifers) and Seasonal Display Gardens (bulbs, annuals, mums).
Coming this summer is a new M.S. Hershey Tribute Garden. It’ll feature 75 ‘M.S. Hershey’ roses, a dark-red type named after Mr. Hershey in 1940.
Mark June 23 on your calendar as a day when the Gardens celebrates its 75th anniversary with reduced admission prices ($7.50 for adults and 75 cents for ages 3-12).
I’ll be doing a couple of programs on April 14. In the morning, I’ll talk about my handy-dandy system of growing veggies (“How to Grow Dinner,” 10 a.m., $15), and in the afternoon, I’ll be doing a “walk-and-talk” through the Gardens focusing on what to prune when and how to do it (2 p.m., $10). If you’re interested in either of those, reserve a spot by calling 508-5972.
The Gardens web site is at www.hersheygardens.org.