At the annual Burpee Open, visitors get a one-day look inside the region’s most innovative gardens

For nearly 150 years, the Burpee seed company has bred fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers at the sprawling Fordhook Farms in Bucks County, each year testing out countless new varieties in tucked-away gardens that the public rarely gets to glimpse — except for one summer Saturday.

That’s when, as part of a tradition dating back more than a century, the seed company opens its gardens to the public for the annual Burpee Open, set this year for July 27.

For one day, guests can explore Fordhook’s secluded garden paths, admire its historic seedhouse, and glean home-gardening tips from horticultural experts. While select splendors will have to be appreciated from afar — guests can glimpse Burpee’s massive trial garden from behind a fence – the rest of the overlooked bucolic jewel will be open to wanderers.

“People are familiar with Burpee name,” said Jennifer Adams, Burpee’s chief marketing officer. “But they don’t necessarily realize that we have this gardener’s paradise right in Philadelphia’s backyard.”

The free event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and features live music, food trucks, bouquet-making stations, scavenger hunts for the kids, and pop-up stands selling Burpee seeds, is both a floral festival and showcase, she said.

“We want people to be inspired – to have a sense of peace and escape,” she said.

The Burpee Open is nearly as old as the 150-year-old plant and seed company.

The company’s founder, W. Atlee Burpee, a precious Philadelphia medical student with an interest in high-quality seed, did not wait long to provide his Doylestown Township neighbors with a behind-the-scenes peek into his growing operation.

“Burpee’s Fordhook Seed Farm seemed to vie with the ideal summer day,” The Inquirer wrote in August 1895 of one of the first Burpee Opens. “Farmers with their families inspected the large garden spot, enjoying the fragrance of the flowers together with the fields of plants clothed in brightest colors, many of which were curiosities to all.”

What started as a small farmer’s picnic for a few hundred locals and city dwellers who trekked to the 61-acre estate by carriage and train has blossomed into a growing event attended by as many as 5,000 people, said George Ball, the Burpee chairman.

“The Burpee Open is all about showing you things that you’ve never seen before and making you feel things you’ve never felt,” said Ball, who bought the company in 1991 and has all but transformed Fordhook’s 15 gardens into works of floral art, dotting them with local sculptures.

On a recent afternoon, Ball, 72, originally from Chicago, toured the farm in a golf cart, wheeling past row after row of plants. “Each garden contains worlds within worlds,” he mused.

There’s the Happiness Garden, a pollinator’s paradise brimming with butterflies and bees and explosions of star-shaped flowers. There’s the Stumpery, the world’s largest tree stump garden, an otherworldly nook where tiny garden kingdoms grow on jagged stubs. And the Kitchen Garden, a bounty of towering sunflowers, bright zinnias and bursting tomatoes nestled along a dry creekbed bursting with plantlife.

The Carolina Shade Garden is home to a mixture of perennials that thrive in shade and sun and dedicated to Ball’s late mother. A stainless-steel egg with a mirrored surface sits at the center, so guests can stand in the shade garden and glimpse surrounding plots.

The Conifer Meadow’s pine trees look like sculptures themselves – but are, in fact, extreme mutations, one-of-a-kind plants.

And there is the seedhouse, where, a century ago, Burpee workers would carefully collect seeds and the old manor, where Burpee himself would compile his annual catalog, and the vast Trial Garden, where new varietals are grown and tested.

“We’re looking for things that grow uniformly, that are resilient, beautiful, and taste delicious,” Ball said, standing amid rows of tomatoes and peppers.

More than anything, Ball says, he wants the annual event to be as much about admiring flowers and vegetables as it is about learning to grow them at home. Despite the perfection of the Burpee gardens, almost everything that’s grown there is designed to stun – but also to thrive in a backyard.

“We want people to learn, to be successful,” Ball said.