Beauty in the Gardn

But the accomplishment that makes his fascinating life worth remembering is the garden he created at his home, Pleasant Valley Farm, in Monkton, Maryland. From the fields and pastures that came up to the house, he carved out twenty-two acres to be his garden. A novice in garden planning, he drew upon what he had observed in the great gardens of Europe, creating a garden informed by the influences of Gertrude Jekyll and other great early-20th-century English gardeners as well as by the garden masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.  To provide for long vistas, he designed two cross axes. At the intersection, in the center of the Great Bowl, is Ladew’s oval swimming pool. Fifteen garden rooms, each with a different theme, are arranged off the axes. There is the yellow garden, featuring plants with golden foliage; a white garden dazzling for its purity; and an iris garden overlooked from an Italianate balcony. Ladew dubbed his apple orchard his “Garden of Eden” and added a statue of Adam and Eve in which Eve offers an apple to Adam, who already has two hidden in his hand behind his back. The “sculpture” garden is packed with topiaries of mythical birds atop spiral-clipped pedestals, fanciful lyres, Winston Churchill’s bowler hat, and Churchill’s “V” for victory sign. The terrace garden is hedged with hemlock and yew embellished with pruned garlands and pyramid finials. Another hedge features a flock of swans swimming along the top.  The art of topiary was virtually unknown in the United States before Ladew began creating his garden. He loved telling the story of the time he was stopped by a woman who said to him, “I saw your lovely garden in Maryland. Those wonderful hedges and all that beautiful Tipperary.”

“It was hard to keep from laughing,” Ladew related in The Life and Gardens of Harvey Ladew, by Christopher Weeks, “and I thought I would never again hear anything as funny about my garden, but when I reached Palm Beach, a man said to me, ‘Mr. Ladew, your name came up the other night at a dinner party. I understand you are the authority on Utopia.’”  Ladew’s fascination with topiary began when he was foxhunting in England and came across a hedge with a pack of topiary hounds running across the top after a fox. Vowing to create the scene in his own garden, he went further, creating a tableau that features two mounted horses, one jumping over a gate in a hedge, chasing after a pack of hounds that are in hot pursuit of the fox out in front. This scene has become the iconic symbol of Ladew Topiary Gardens.  Today, the house and gardens are open to the public seven days a week between April 1 and October 31. As Ladew himself was wont to say, it’s all “perfectly delightful.”