Cultivating ‘a blank slate and the gardener’s dream’ in Mount Airy
In addition to cultivating his own back yard, Patrick Hauck is among neighbors who support the Houston Elementary School garden.
The Victorian cottage in Mount Airy was “more than a little tired,” Patrick Hauck said, when he and John Haynes purchased it in 2004. The “ragged” landscape featured one dying tree and one planted too close to the house.
But the backyard’s gentle slope with southern exposure was “a blank slate and the gardener’s dream,” Hauck said. Though the property is less than a quarter-acre, it backs onto the Cresheim Woods part of Fairmount Park and offers an expansive green vista from the home’s first- and second-floor porches, added to the cottage in 1920.
To restore the crumbling porches, Hauck and Haynes replicated a surviving original column and copied the sunburst brackets from a neighbor’s porch.
The cottage is one of four built on the block in 1888. Lavender ceilings, gold sunbursts and purple trim pick up flower colors in the garden. Gray columns and other woodwork match the slate patio.
In early summer, porch guests, relaxing on cushioned wicker furniture, watch pink mimosa blossoms wave in the breeze and admire beds filled with crimson bee balm and salvia, yellow black-eyed Susan, blue globe thistle, and orange day lilies.
The garden features many native pollinator plants. Sun bronze fennel provides shelter for butterflies and swamp milkweed provides food.
A shady seating area in the lower garden is planted with hot-pink begonias, spiky lavender acanthus, and purple ageratum.
The homeowners converted the 1920s garage into a red-roofed garden shed anchored into the landscape with flower-filled window boxes.
Hauck, who completed a Penn State extension course to become a master gardener, said he “keeps plugging away, multiplying and subtracting plants.” Sometimes, he admitted, things go wrong. The koi pond in a side garden sprang a leak during the spring, and “we lost all the fish.” Groundhogs have been nibbling pepper plants in the vegetable beds.
Hauck planted his first garden when he was 7 years old and living in Indiana, where he and Haynes grew up and met. They have lived in Mount Airy since 1990.
They downsized to the cottage from a larger home. Both houses had six bedrooms, but the smaller residence has only 2,000 square feet while the previous one had more than 3,000 and a shady yard.
Also, their cottage is in a quieter location. Their old home, Haynes said, was near a firehouse.
Like the porch, the interior of the house has colors that relate to the garden. The dining room and primary bedroom walls are lavender. The staircase wall is striped in two shades of moss green.
The homeowners installed a skylight at the top of the stairwell and had oak spindles and the banister stripped of layers of paint.
The first-floor exterior of the cottage is stone. Shingles on the second floor are painted gray-green, the third floor, gold. A maroon entry door matches the leaves of the Japanese maple shrub.
Before retiring, Haynes worked in information services at Penn Medicine, and Hauck was director of neighborhood programs for the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia.
Together they planted the weeping cherry and dogwood in the front yard. Haynes continues to care for the house plants but, at 67, has retired from outdoor gardening.
To be able to continue to bend and lift, “I do lots of yoga,” said Hauck, 66.
He needs to stay fit. Three years ago he began assisting a STEM teacher at nearby Houston Elementary School who had started a garden as an outdoor classroom.
Since then, Hauck and other volunteers, including several neighborhood children, have tended to donated plants. Houston parents painted wooden butterflies to decorate garden beds and one of the fathers stenciled flowers on the school sign.
Besides some duplication of the kinds of flowers in the gardens, there are other connections between the cottage and school: The Wissahickon schist used for the house was quarried on the site of the future school, built in 1926.
The school is named for Henry Houston a railroad magnate who developed much of Northwestern Philadelphia, including Mount Airy. Brothers George and William Hewitt, architects who worked for Houston, also designed the four charming cottages.
“The kids will have a blast when they come back to school,” Hauck said. “The sunflowers will be 10 feet high.”
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