Hortulus Farm: Where History & Horticulture Meet

(lighthearted music) (dog barking) (soft music) - Hortulus Farm is an 18th century, hundred-acre farmstead and pleasure garden.

Located about an hour and 20 minutes from New York City, and about 45 minutes from Philadelphia.

We have 24 gardens on our acreage.

And we're really about horticultural education, and connecting you with nature.

We're open to the public from May to October for self-touring.

And if you have a group of eight or more, we're happy to give you a guided tour.

The story of Hortulus Farm really begins in 1681 when Charles II of England deeded 45,000 square miles of land to William Penn.

Penn, of course, was a Quaker, and had been imprisoned in London for his religious views.

And his idea was that he would sell parcels of land to people who were seeking to escape religious persecution in Europe.

(soft music) In 1683, he sold a thousand acres of land to the Tanner brothers of London.

That parcel was subsequently inherited, resold, re-inherited, divided, sold again, until about 1748 when the Dawes and Warner families intermarried, and united 300 acres into what eventually became Hortulus Farm.

In nearly 19th century, the Warners married into the Thompson family, and they ran the farm as a big dairy operation right into the 20th century.

After 170 years of tenancy, the last of the Warner-Thompsons sold the farm in 1918 to Isaac Ryan, who ran a big sawmill operation on the property.

(lively music) In 1931, during both prohibition and the Great Depression, Isaac Ryan sold the farm to a man named Musselman.

Musselman turned out to be a bootlegger named Capriati.

When the Feds rated the farm in 1932, they found 20,000 gallons of rye mash and a thousand gallons still in the barns.

It was the largest bootleg bust in Bucks County history.

Caprioti posted bond and fled abandoning the farm, and by 1933, of Pharmaco derelict it was known locally as Skunk Hollow and was sold at Sheriff's Sale for $370 and 91 cents.

We arrived in 1979 and because it was such a poor farm nothing had been monkeyed with the house was pure, the barns were pure and what we inherited was a truly wonderful and intact peace of Bucks County history.

And so we just plunged in, started fixing things up, and started a garden.

(soft music) - It was 1977 that a friend of mine brought me to Bucks County and I fell in love with the architecture the 18th century stone houses, the rolling fields, the ponds, the streams, the lakes.

So I decided that I wanted to have a weekend house here away from New York City where I had an event design business creating parties across the country from Hollywood to the White House to Studio 54.

I was reading the local newspaper and there was an ad for a farm in Wrightstown that I thought, well this sounded too good to be true.

I drove down the driveway and just said, this is it.

And I had been living in a small apartment in New York City so 15 acres seemed like I had bought half the state of Pennsylvania.

During the closing, the then owner of the house threw the keys across the table at me and said, "Good luck keeping that place up."

Well, I was terrified but 15 acres soon didn't seem all that much.

We now have a hundred acres here.

We could not possibly have accomplished all this without the help of many people particularly our advisory board Chairman Glen Lajeski who generously donated 32 acres to Hortulus, and helped with the creation of many of our gardens.

And our farm manager Bob Richie and his wife Rose who have maintained the farm and helped make Hortulus the happy beautiful place that it is.

(soft music) We changed the name of the farm from Pleasant Valley, which was a little too pleasant and charming to Hortulus farm, which means small garden in Latin.

(bright upbeat music) I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

Apparently I was a brat, and my next door neighbor to keep me from breaking windows with baseballs decided to keep my hands busy by showing me how to propagate by making cuttings and creating a whole new plant.

Well, this became a lifelong patient.

My parents were so thrilled that I was doing something positive that they really encouraged it.

In college, I decided to combine my love of gardening and horticulture and my love of art history and got a a degree in landscape architecture in urban and regional planning.

No matter how long you live, you cannot know everything about horticulture.

It's a wonderful field and it's not only a great vocation but it's a great avocation.

(bright guitar music) - When we first moved to the farm, I knew nothing about vegetable gardening.

So I started in a very rudimentary way.

And then we took a trip to England, visited Barnsley House and met Rosemary Verey for the first time.

Her bojaizure at Barnsley house was a spectacular garden both for its beauty and its productivity and Rosemary essentially became my mentor in terms of vegetable gardening.

And really became interested in beautiful varieties and unique varieties of vegetables.

And it became my passion in a way.

And over the last 35 years, I've developed a pretty amazing looking vegetable gardening both productive and beautiful hopefully It's become my life's work.

(soft upbeat music) What Rosemary very taught me was that you need at least a half a day or more of good sun to develop a successful vegetable garden.

Also that you shouldn't place it too far from your kitchen doors, you'll never get there often enough.

The whole idea is raised beds and vertical structure raised beds, of course, not only heating up faster in spring, but they lift the garden work up towards you so that you don't have to bend over so far to vegetable garden.

They also define the beds from the paths in a very distinct way so you're never climbing into your beds which means that you do not compact your soil and you don't crush your seedlings.

And then the idea of vertical structure of getting structure off the ground so that you can grow up the vining vegetables like squash and tomatoes, et cetera and enlarge your real estate.

It not only makes it it more productive, but it makes it more beautiful 'cause you've got this wonderful architecture in the garden.

(soft upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) The Edward Rums were for many years a garden in search of a personality.

It basically started 'cause you have to rotate your crops, especially for things like brassicas and tomatoes, if you plant them too often, year after year in the same place, you will get soil-borne viruses, and you'll never be able to plant them again essentially.

We planted a pons tree up there and we developed an idea of island beds, took out all the grass paths and took about 10 years for it developed into a garden.

It's filled with some perennial fruiting plants and then annual vegetables.

And I'm very excited about perennial fruiting plants, especially.

My favorite is the kiwi called kiwi issai which is hardy self fertile and gives you bite size fuzz kiwis.

It's brilliant.

(bright upbeat music) The fruit folder was actually inspired by a book I wrote in the series that I started with and I actually knew almost nothing about fruit gardening to be honest.

And I just googled and wikipediaed my way through as much as I could, and I learned about all kinds of fascinating fruit that we were able to grow here and developed a border out of basically fruiting shrubs and some small trees.

It's been a very exciting enterprise, I have to say.

- We are now very fortunate in having just a little over two dozen gardens here at Hortulus Farm.

There's so many different types of plants that we can grow here in Zone 6B in southeast Pennsylvania.

So it's really ridiculous to limit it to just a few and see the same plant over and over again.

So what I've tried to do is have different plants in the woodland walk as different from the wide open spaces, but I also want it to be a horticultural experience where you walk through the different gardens and see different types of plants so that you're not seeing the same plant over and over again.

(soft music) It's developed over the years and as we've seen which areas are drier, which areas are wetter, and just having this sense of what's appropriate, it really is interesting to have it kind of develop, so that it doesn't just all land at once.

Yes, there may be portions of it that should all be done at once, but planning and design are key elements of creating any garden.

I used to tell my clients all the time when they were creating weddings or bar mitzvahs or whatever don't try to just put on the dog, do what's appropriate to your lifestyle and your way of life and I think that's really so important.

And happily, we've grown into the appropriateness of Hortulus Farm.

(soft upbeat music) With any garden, whether I'm designing it for myself here at Hortulus or for a client, you sort of look at what are the attributes of the area and figure out is there a vista and do you want to create a narrow space?

And then it goes into an open space so that you have that interest.

And the same thing is true of creating focal points all around.

We have the fountain in the center of the pool and the pavilion that's in the center of the pond.

All of those things create interesting focal points as you move through a garden.

(soft guitar music) We decided to create a library in this particular barn.

It was kind of falling apart and all of the siding was off of the south side of the building and it was a beautiful fall day.

And I said, okay, stop guys.

We're not putting the siding up on this side of the barn.

I want it to be glass.

We put in all of these beams, added rough sun wood all the way around to create library shelves.

And now they're over a thousand books in here all on horticulture and gardening.

Some of them are really quite rare, their first edition Vita Sackville-West, Humphrey Reins, et cetera.

So the really quite wonderful books on horticulture and gardening.

And there are even some letters that Gertrude Jekyll wrote to her portraitist William Nicholson that are quite wonderful.

And then there's Rosemary Verey, another English gardener who was really the inspiration for Jack with his vegetable gardens.

They're letters from her that are hanging on the walls also.

(soft guitar music) And whenever we have guests that come visit the gardens and decide to take the museum tour as well, they really love seeing our collection of Bucks County impressionist paintings.

From about 1880 until the mid 20th century, painters came here, they were plain air painters following William Langson Lathrop who was a well-known painter and created the Phillips Mill Art Association in New Hope.

It falls into our love of this area and what goes on here.

We've collected a number of 18th century antiques and a very large collection of majolica.

One of the reasons for the majolica is that being an 18th century house, the windows are not huge, the rooms are rather dark, and the Metallica not only has wonderful color to it but almost all Majolica is based on natural themes and that so goes along with everything that we're about here at Hortulus Farm.

(bright guitar music) (birds chirping) In the interest of creating a more exciting and interesting visual experience for visitors to the garden, we decided to have exhibitions of outdoor sculptures.

And we came about doing all of this in collaboration with the James A. Michener Art Museum here in Doylestown, and they've been very helpful with suggesting artists.

We've had a very positive response from our visitors about these sculptures.

They can come back year after year and see different things happening in the garden and that makes it much more exciting.

As we move them around within the gardens, they become different focal points.

So all of this adds to the landscape design of the gardens and it really makes it more fun for us as well.

(bright upbeat music) - It's really quite marvelous how he came to the idea that we were gonna leave this place as a public garden.

It came to us very slowly.

We were working full-time in New York.

We were only out here on weekends for the first 20 years we owned the farm.

We started gardening and then people started coming to visit the gardens and we started opening them for charitable events, et cetera.

And one year, about 15 years in, we said, "Well, maybe we should think about formalizing this in some way."

And so we opened up the garden one day a week and then we opened it up to garden clubs and last year we had 3000 visitors.

The idea that we took on this project meant we were very callow and young and we just thought nothing of it.

I don't know why we were perfectly foolish, honestly.

(upbeat guitar music) - So about 10 years ago when we realized that the gardens might be of some importance and realizing that there's nothing else like this in Bucks County in terms of the perfection of the 18th century house and the elaborate gardens around the house and wanting to have some sort of horticultural significance for the community in the future, we decided to create Hortulus Farm Foundation so that hopefully at our demise it will be a public garden in perpetuity.

We're hoping that it will also be a place of horticultural education, partially due to the nursery and partially due to the library.

And we have the great satisfaction that the Garden Conservancy have asked us to be an affiliate.

And this is really quite important in terms of people knowing about us and coming to visit.

- And the idea that we could leave something sustaining for the future became a marvelous thought.

The fact that you have been stewards of this wonderful property for all these years and we can now give it unto other hands for perpetuity to inspire people, to connect them with nature to have a a space of respite in an increasingly difficult and complex, even hostile world that's incredibly meaningful to us.

(bright upbeat music)