Landis Valley's newest historic garden is revolutionary because it's 'just for pretty' [photos, video]

Inside a tidy white picket fence grow cosmos and zinnias, herbs and daisies.

Vintage bricks surround the flower beds. Black-eyed Susan vines climb the trellis at the entrance.

This is the “Just for Pretty” garden, but there’s a lot going on here beyond the beauty.

The newest garden at Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum shows what could be created in 1880s when things like cast iron stoves or sewing machines would allow a woman to do more than survive and provide. It shows the kinds of plants and materials that would have been available in Lancaster long before gardeners could order anything online. It’s a living, growing lesson of something that’s often not covered in history books.

“Now she could plant flowers instead of just vegetables,” says Bob Haas, an heirloom seed project volunteer and the person behind this new garden.

A pleasure garden

The 1880s pleasure garden is close to the blacksmith shop and replaces an herb garden that took too much time for volunteers of the seed project, as that project grows. The seed project preserves heirloom vegetables and plants grown in the Pennsylvania Dutch region.

Before the herb garden was planted, this was where a crew added a building for the filming of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” starring Oprah Winfrey.

Before that, there was a barn next to the 1860s-era Pennsylvania German farmhouse that now houses the heirloom seed project.

Throughout the Landis Valley homestead, the growing side of living history are found in gardens producing seeds for the heirloom project, plus three edible gardens. Each of these three gardens show what would have been grown for food at different times from the mid-18th century through the early 19th century.

Soon after Haas started volunteering, he was asked how he would replace the herb garden.

He read an account from the 1880s of a woman and a visiting friend in a flower garden.

“The visitor asked, ‘Why did you plant this?’ as if to say, ‘We don’t do this,’” he says. “And she said, ‘I did it just for pretty.’”

This woman from long ago became his inspiration for the new garden.

“Here was a person who had time and resources to plant something that they didn’t have to have just to stay alive,” he says.

With help from Joe Schott, Landis Valley’s farm and gardens manager, the garden plot was excavated to remove remaining stones from the barn. Topsoil and composted manure from museum grounds were added to enrich the soil.