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If you’re in the market for inspiration (and who isn’t?), take the enhanced garden tour of Old Town Lancaster. It was never your average garden tour. For many years, it was enough to walk down tree-lined streets past quaint residences and step into hidden gardens.
But there’s a new draw: entrée into the homes as well as the gardens on the tour. The first time this was offered, it drew 500 people. In one day.
The tour includes about a dozen properties, all within walking distance. Some have never been featured on the tour, and some have changed hands or been redone. Since it’s held every other year, this is just the second time ticket holders can stroll through the first floors of homes in this sought-after neighborhood. It’s a hip enclave where neighbors actually chill together. Summer picnics, pub socials, chili cook-offs, even an annual banquet.
“There’s a great camaraderie here,” says Terry Scheneck, who has lived there 35 years. He says most people who leave do it involuntarily, because of job transfers or other life changes. A few who have left try to get back in.
A Place of Transformation
Resident Gary Hufford recalls, “One home sold in 24 hours. After a bidding war.” Hufford’s completely rehabbed property was on the 2016 tour. He found it while taking the tour himself a few years back. It was in a sad state of disrepair, and few saw its promise. But you can’t tell by looking at it now. The home is painted buttermilk with black trim, and wisteria vines lead to a raised deck, its view a pleasing mesh of red maples and roof angles.
Even without much turnover, the neighborhood changes enough that the tour is always a fresh experience. Scheneck observes, “You experiment more readily because the yards are small. It’s easy to change things; a tree falls down, and a shade garden becomes a sunny garden.”
As you walk through, you’ll be glad this historic district was saved, instead of razed, a very real threat in the 1970s. The interiors of these houses, some of which date from the 1700s, hold surprises. While the exteriors retain their period look, it’s a whole other deal beyond the front door. Some feature open floor plans and vaulted ceilings. Others blend the old and the new: an original fireplace here, a glassed in shower there. A brick kitchen floor at one address, mod seating next door. It’s all a great tease for the gardens themselves.
Many of the yards present common city challenges: they’re small, or oddly shaped, or both. Jim Mummert says the previous owner of his property was “not a gardener, at all.” When he moved in, he was faced with a sloping, overgrown yard, a large diseased tree, and a rotted deck with no access from the house.
Mummert and friends set to work, performing major surgery on the yard, turning it into “what people call ‘an oasis in the center of the city.’” A Buddha presides over the walled garden, surrounded by rhododendrons and snow-on-the-mountain. A geometric fountain burbles down by the new deck, and flowering planters soften the edges of a high fence. You almost expect your yoga teacher to appear and instruct you to breathe deeply.
Down a nearby alley lies an English garden, where riotous blooms line a herringboned brick path. A waterfall splashes across from an espaliered pear tree. Colorful watering cans line an old bench, and two inviting patio areas beckon. It’s so charming you wonder if you might be offered freshly baked scones.
You might enjoy the tour even more of if you try to guess as you move to each property: will the inside of a home match its front? What secrets do the walls keep? What might the garden reveal? If you hear one property was a brothel, ask around. Try to guess where Milton Hershey lived with his mother, and where the guests were staying while their horses slept in the stalls at the stone carriage house.
Feel free to come up with your own fables. And take bets on the style you’ll see inside and outside the next home. It’s really hard to tell. One couple’s refined interior leads to an elongated pond and impressive bonsai specimens. Another conceals a generous, elegant patio, with a couch, framed by a towering weeping cedar. Have they always been this gorgeous? Of course not.
Backstage Prep
What happens before the tour is like the backstage before the sets have been designed. Take one artist’s home. Today, it opens to a creative garden that mirrors his radiant paintings. But it wasn’t always that way. Recognizing a redesign was in order, the owner hired garden specialist Mindy Moyer to take it to a new level.
“It was a process,” explains Moyer, “and we worked together. There was a horrible pyracanthus” [an evergreen shrub with berries] “that had grown into a small tree.” They removed that along with “at least eight shrubs,” and built a stone wall to replace railroad ties. Adding texture and foliage to the purple and silver scheme inspired by a lavender plant, Moyer planted sedum, moss, and alliums. She placed a pair of potted acanthus near the back door for “height and visual upward motion” and suggested a sculpture. A cinnamon-colored tree form, commissioned from the artist’s drawing, visually anchors a sloping fence.
Moyer says she likes the tour “because you get to chat with fellow gardeners, and there are quite a few of them. It’s such a wonderful neighborhood; you just walk from place to place and see what has been done with those beautiful houses. That’s the best kind of tour, where you can see what other people are doing and get inspired.”
If you go:
Date: Sunday, June 17, from 12-5 p.m.
Tickets are $12, which funds the two public gardens and potted flowering plants in the neighborhood.
You can purchase tickets on the day of the tour at the tent at South Duke and East Vine Streets.
For more details, see The Neighborhoods of Old Town Lancaster PA on Facebook.