08-20-2023 Harford Magazine - Flipbook - Page 36
Ladew Topiary Gardens Butterfly House opened
in 2014.
On Sept. 9, Ladew will hold a special family
program on butterfly migration that will explore
their fascinating lives in fuller detail.
Butterfly Migration
Saturday, Sept. 9 from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Borowy never gets over the mystery of it
all.
Why, she wonders, do most monarchs live
for just five weeks while the super generation
monarchs born in late summer live for up
to eight months? Why does one generation
make it all the way south, mate and then die,
while it takes two or three generations to
return to Maryland in the spring?
“How do they know?” she asks. “How do
they know that this is their destination when
they’ve never been here before?”
Visitors to the 22-acre topiary garden
just north of the Baltimore County line may
find themselves pondering that and other
questions about the relationship between
humans and the natural world, and how that
relationship has evolved over the centuries.
The gardens are a result of the singular
vision of Harvey Ladew, an early 20th
century heir to a leather manufacturing
fortune.
In 1929, Ladew left his native Long Island,
New York, and bought a rundown 250acre farm in Monkton, according to Emily
Emerick, the topiary garden’s executive
director. At the time, Harford County was
prime fox-hunting territory, a sport for
which Ladew had a passion.
The farmhouse lacked both running water
and electricity, while the lands surrounding
it were mostly flat — effectively a blank
palette for an artist on the verge of finding
his calling.
Over the next four decades, Ladew
transformed his surroundings bit by
bit, doing most of the hard work of the
landscaping himself.
During a childhood visit to England, he
had fallen in love with topiary. Emerick said
that topiary, the practice of pruning trees and
shrubs into ornamental shapes, dates back at
least to the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Ladew converted a portion of the grounds
into 15 garden “rooms,” that include about
100 topiary. He added fountains and statues,
a Grecian-style temple and a pond filled with
water lilies.
Among other spaces, there’s a Victorian
garden, a croquet court, a yellow garden, a
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| Fall 2023 | harfordmagazine.com
rose garden and the Garden of Adam and
Eve — in which a statue of Adam slyly hides
an apple behind his back even before Eve
offers him the forbidden fruit. A visitor
favorite is the topiary of a fox being chased
by a parcel of hounds, as a horse and rider
bound over a shrubbery fence.
“Ladew created the grounds himself with
very little help,” Emerick said.
“A local mortician helped him dig
the great bowl.” she said, referring to the
sweeping expanse of land that includes
12 topiary swans surrounding an oval
swimming pool, “and he also worked with
local amateur gardeners. But, he was mostly
self-taught. He looked at what he created as
living sculpture.”
In 1925, only half of homes in the U.S.
were wired for electricity, according to the
National Park Service. The sun dictated
when people woke and when they slept.
Once-thriving communities became ghost
towns for lack of rain. Nature could seem
capricious and cruel, and human beings were
at its mercy.
Topiary appealed to early 20th century
gardeners because it seemed to promise
that this unruly force could be tamed and
controlled with a can-do attitude and a little
human ingenuity.
A century later, that perception has shifted
dramatically. The debate in 2023 focuses less
on bringing nature to heel and more on the
havoc that human intervention is wreaking
on the environment, and how that negative
impact can be reversed.
Both perspectives are represented at
Ladew.
Today, visitors can marvel at human
inventiveness by visiting the 15 outdoor
