North Hills Garden Tour w/ Lauren Nagoda and Chris & Tom Brockmeyer
Location: Two home gardens in North Hills/McCandless (~10 minutes apart, addresses will be sent the day before the tour)
Date: Saturday, August 17th
Time: 10am – 12pm
Limited space! (Registration will close the Thursday before the event.)
Lauren Nagoda’s Garden
Back in December 2021, we moved into our new house, greeted by a yard that was mostly just grass and a whole bunch of pushy invasive plants taking over the place. Spent the winter just staring out at it, dreaming up ways to jazz it up.
Come spring 2022, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Dug out all sorts of funky-shaped garden beds, kicked out as much grass as I could, and even threw in a raised veggie patch for good measure.
The front yard got a bit of a break over the summer while I let the grass die off, but come fall, I was back at it, planting like there was no tomorrow.
Last summer, I took on the backyard slope, wrestling with invasive plants left and right. I’m still learning as I go, and while I can’t claim to be 100% native just yet, things are definitely looking up.
Nowadays, our yard’s like a party for nature, with birds chirping, moths flapping, butterflies fluttering, and who knows what else dropping by for a good time.
Chris and Tom Brockmeyer’s Garden
We moved into our McCandless Township home in the summer of 2021. Our lot is 1.4 acres and is surrounded by mature and exceedingly tall Norwegian Spruce and Arbor Vitae and, when we moved in, was otherwise, covered, primarily, in turf grass. Older foundation plantings were a mix of native and non-native plants which we have left intact. In short, it was a suburban wildlife desert. We have been inspired by the designs of Piet Oudolf (Highline, NYC, Millenium Park, Chicago, Museum Voorlinden, Holland) and began to think about a plan which would attract pollinators and birds (We are avid bird photographers.). As we considered the changes, we attended workshops at Phipps and the Phipps Botanical Garden to increase our knowledge of the movement toward more native plantings.
With the help of our son, Ned, who is the Urban and Community Forestry Program Manager for PA, and Ben Haake, local landscape designer and horticulturist at the Heinz Estate, Fox Chapel, we developed a plan for a native garden/meadowscape with a transition zone of understory trees (redbud, native dogwood) and shrubs (viburnum, witchhazel) in addition to an orchard of apple, crabapple, cherry and persimmon trees, only a few of which can be considered native. As a work in progress (now in our third season), we have made numerous mistakes, battle deer daily and are continuing to weed out invasives. Two seasons ago, we aerated the remaining lawn aggressively and seeded it with a bee lawn mixture from OPN Seed. We subscribe to No Mow May and avoid cutting flowering plants in our lawn throughout the summer season.
Tom is a retired orthopaedic surgeon and Chris is a homemaker (not really retired). It is of great importance to us to take part in the restoration of natural environments however small; and, it is, in part, also a legacy for our children and grandchildren to see that it can be achieved. It has also served as a laboratory for experimentation of planting strategies and exploration of the insects and birds that we now attract by having created a more natural habitat. As one grandchild stated, “Wow, you’ve created an ecosystem! I didn’t know that old ladies could do that.”
