Four of Our Best Home Gardens
June 14th, 2022
A fair number of south-central Pennsylvania homes have little to no landscaping.
A fountain and arbor in Jill and John Hudocks’ back yard.
A majority have passable to middling plantings – enough to “fit in” or at least avoid being neighborhood embarrassments.
Then there are the glorious few where the ambitious owners were bit by the plant bug and ended up building truly outstanding home gardens.
Two busloads of garden appreciators got to see four of our region’s best home gardens last week in a local “Home-Grown Gardens” tour that Lowee’s Group Tours of Harrisburg and I put together. It was our fourth installment of these home-garden tours over the years.
I thought I’d share these superb planting efforts with those of you who didn’t get to experience the wow-ness of seeing them first-hand.
Read on for a brief rundown of the four gardens… or better yet, go to my Photo Gallery web page to see 10 pictures from each place.
Bill and Jane Allis’ “The Bower”
Some people take to the rocking chairs or swimming-pool lounges when they retire.
One of the 10 sculptures at the Allis’ Bower native-plant garden and sculpture park in Perry County.
Not Bill and Jane Allis of Shermans Dale, Perry County.
This environmental engineer and early childhood educator used the occasion of retirement to hire a world-famous landscape-architecture firm to develop a master plan for their 36 acres of secluded Perry County countryside.
Three years later, they have an incredible “wildscape” they call “The Bower: A Native Garden and Sculpture Park.”
The centerpiece is a six-acre meadow that’s now in its second full season and ready to flourish in the next two months.
There are also groupings of 7,000 native perennials, 200 native trees and shrubs, a “stumpery” that’s a sort of sculpture made of out of uprooted dead trees, a shady wetland habitat with a series of pools, and trails through the woods.
The whole thing is overlaid with a collection of 10 sculptures that the Allises commissioned from 130 applications that they got from sculptors around the world. The 10 sculptures that now grace The Bower range from a three-foot bronze heron to the kinetic aluminum “Transcending Tides” sculpture to the gigantic, 67-foot-long, 17-ton steel “Ridge and Valley” wall with cutouts representing Pennsylvania’s different eco-regions.
Naturalistic garden fanciers will love this place, which is open to the public by appointment on selected dates – at no charge, too. You just have to go on The Bower website and hit the Visit button at the top to get on the small-group tour list.
Read more about The Bower in an article I wrote here last year when the gardens opened.
Jill and John Hudock’s Shippensburg gardens
This immaculate acre in a typical suburban development is flat-out one of the best home gardens I’ve seen anywhere in the world.
This elevated gazebo is the latest addition to the Hudocks’ landscape.
The layout, plant combinations, and placement of structures and accessories is a living textbook in garden design. Everything looks just so right… and that’s no accident since Jill is a retired garden designer, Master Gardener, and Pennsylvania Certified Horticulturist with a degree in art and an exceptional natural eye for design. She also spent 18 years planting and caring for the Shippensburg Peace Garden at the borough’s Memorial Park.
Jill and husband, John, (recently retired, too), have spent the last 30 years creating and tweaking their original third-of-an-acre lot and then the adjacent two-thirds-of-an-acre lot that had been a retention pond and drainage field.
The drainage field is now a gorgeous English cottage-style garden filled with bulbs, perennials, reseeding annuals, flower pots, specimen trees and shrubs, and numerous hardscape focal points, including arbors, benches, urns, and the latest addition, a huge elevated gazebo that overlooks the entire garden.
Paths lead through the rest of the property, which includes a shaded back line with a boardwalk sitting area, a new summer kitchen, a conservatory above the home’s garage, and a back-yard garden anchored by a large fountain and one-time children’s playhouse.
Jill and John make a good team. Her strong suit is visioning what will work and look great in a particular spot, while John is incredibly handy with tools and wood to turn those visions into reality.
I’ve seen this yard several times now over the years, and it somehow keeps improving on perfection each time.
Shippensburg’s News-Chronicle newspaper did a detailed profile on the Hudocks’ garden a few years ago if you want to read more.
Karl Mattson’s Gettysburg backyard haven
Set in a wooded grove next to the Gettysburg Battlefield is an acre or so of peaceful shade that’s been planted over the last 24 years by Karl Mattson, a retired Gettysburg College chaplain and founder of the college’s Center for Public Service.
This view greets visitors when they walk down Karl Mattson’s driveway.
What I like best about Karl’s creation is the wow first view you get when you head down his driveway and see what looks like a cover shot from Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
A water feature with a babbling drop is in the foreground. That’s flanked with a gate-lined grassy path leading down the left side and a winding mulched path leading down the right.
The key focal point, though, is a rustic gazebo that was added just a couple of years ago. It was the idea of Karl’s garden helper, Liz Chronister, who thought that would make the perfect feature for this special spot.
Not only is the gazebo in a key location, it takes the place of what had been the garden’s most special plant – a Magnolia sieboldii that was planted in honor of the Mattsons’ 50th wedding anniversary. Karl’s wife died a few years later, and then the tree died several years after that.
At first, the dead tree was painted red. Then when it began to rot, a fire pit took its place. Although that was nice, it didn’t quite cut it as the successor to the special tree. The gazebo fills the assignment perfectly.
Paths weave in and out of the gardens around the gazebo and through the rest of the area that’s a blend of shade and pockets of sunlight.
Karl already has sold the land to the battlefield with the aim of these gardens ultimately becoming a peace garden that would be open to the public and part of the battlefield.
Read more about Karl’s garden in a post I wrote last year after seeing his “Wow First View” for the first time.
The Gesfords’ Camp Hill secret garden
Although Alan and Dorothy Gesford’s 1.4-acre yard is sandwiched between the busy Trindle Road and Carlisle Pike near the Camp Hill/Hampden Twp. border, you’d never notice it. That’s because it’s tucked away behind trees up a private lane just off South 36th St., which connects Trindle to the Pike.
The gazebo that’s the centerpiece of Dorothy and Alan Gesford’s Camp Hill backyard.
The Gesfords moved there in 1972, soon after Hurricane Agnes dislodged them from their former Conodoguinet Creekside property. Ever since, the plant-loving, Cumberland County Master Gardener Alan has been hard at work on his passion of inserting as many blooming plants as possible into every available space.
What’s left of a lawn amounts to mere pathways through one bed after another, all filled with plantings designed so there’s always some kind of action taking place from the first snowdrops of late winter to the last asters of fall.
I use the term “designed” loosely because as Alan will tell you, he had absolutely no master plan on how the whole thing would come together. He says the gardens kind of organically expanded little by little over the years “haphazardly with additions and changes subject to my whims and fancies at the time.”
The result is a fun and flower-filled gardener’s landscape – the kind of space that you instantly recognize as the handiwork of someone who loves plants of all kinds and wants to surround himself with as much of nature’s diversity as possible.
Alan also happens to like whimsical and artful partners for his plants, so the gardens are accented with objects such as a three-tiered leaf water feature, log carvings of eagles and turtles, flower pots, trolls and fairies, an angelic fountain, and concrete dragons and snakes.
And these gardens also have a gazebo centerpiece, which to my eye is one of the best landscape features you can add to elevate a yard from “nice” to “impressive.”
If you want to see photo galleries of the previous three home-garden tours we’ve done, here are the links:
And here’s a link to the gardens that Sue and I developed in Hampden Twp. as we left them before moving to the Pittsburgh area in 2018.