Walk past the old Haines family home on a late spring morning and you’ll smell it before you see it. Thousands of roses throw their scent over the plain grey fence, teasing the garden that lies behind – a quarter acre of damasks and gallicas and albas in deep pink and cream and crimson, their petals packed tight.

That sound? It’s the bees, moving through the beds, busy collecting their nectar. “Welcome to Wyck,” says Kim Staub, Wyck’s executive director. “I hope you enjoy the peace.”

First-time visitors, Staub says, are often surprised by the quiet green of the grounds behind that fence, which is just a few feet from Germantown Avenue, the busy commercial strip that threads through this Northwest corner of the city. Many visitors to Germantown, which contains more original colonial-era architecture than Williamsburg, drive past it without knowing that the National Historic Landmark is one of Philadelphia’s oldest homesteads. The house dates back to 1690, and the garden is widely considered the oldest fully intact rose garden in America.

But once you step onto the 2.5-acre property, with its shaded paths, old trees, and working farm, you feel you’re in a different world. In a year when the city is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Wyck offers a distinct authenticity. Walking through it is like exploring nine generations of your grandmother’s attic, smell and all.

What they left behind

It was Mary T. Haines who bequeathed the family home to posterity, closing a chapter on generations of history when she moved out in 1973. She left everything behind.

The Haineses and the Wisters were among Philadelphia’s most prominent scientists, re- searchers and horticulturalists in their time. They were also meticulous collectors as well as keepers of every scrap of familial history, so curators would discover what turned out to be the most complete record of one family’s life anywhere in the country.

The more than 10,000 objects that came with the house tell only part of the story. There’s the blue chair once favored by Benjamin Franklin, the hair clippings of a child who died at eleven. But the family also kept meticulous records. They measured the weather every morning. They wrote down the exact day the first rose bloomed.

And this spring, after a $1.23 million exterior restoration, the house that holds it all is looking like itself again.

Deep roots

Wyck’s rose garden is widely considered the oldest in the country. That alone would make it worth visiting. But what makes it singular is what it contains. The more than 50 cultivars of heritage roses represent 200 years of breeding history, and include some varieties that existed nowhere else until they were rediscovered growing here.

“There really is only one garden like this, not just in Philadelphia, but anywhere in the country,” says Nicole Juday, a garden historian, author of Private Gardens of Philadelphia, and a former curator at Wyck. “It gives a clearer sense of how people lived and what a domestic landscape looked like in the 18th and 19th centuries than anything else that we have.”

The earliest plantings at Wyck date to the late 1700s, when the family grew roses primarily as medicinal plants. It was 1821 when Jane Bowne Haines converted what had been a kitchen garden into a formal rose garden. She wanted, as she put it in her letters, “a fine garden to show our visitors.”

At the time, she was collecting damask roses like Celsiana, which had been growing in Germantown since around 1750, and gallicas like Rosa gallica officinalis, the apothecary rose, cultivated since the time of the Crusades.

Three generations of the same family, all named Jane, would tend that garden. Jane Bowne Haines designed it and then died when her youngest child was just eleven years old. That child, also named Jane, grew up to save and preserve the garden through her own long life. Next came her niece, Jane Bowne Haines II, who studied horticulture and went on to found the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women. That site is now Temple’s Ambler campus and still home to a horticulture program.

Later plantings added noisettes and climbing roses, and at least one variety was planted for a specific occasion. The rose known as ‘Lafayette’ was almost certainly put in to mark the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to Wyck in 1825. It was rediscovered in the garden in 1976, long after the variety had been forgotten.

“Each generation at Wyck left their mark on the house and gardens, but each held on to what came before,” Staub says.

Wyck roses are not the fussy, hybridized roses you find at the garden center. Old roses bloom just once a year, on second-year growth, for a few intoxicating weeks in May and early June. When they go, they go all at once. Decades of hybridization have bred much of the fragrance out of modern roses. Hence the unmistakable scent outside Wyck.

“During the short time they are in bloom,” says Juday, “these roses are the most extravagantly beautiful and exquisitely scented plant in any garden.”

Rose gardens like this were once fairly common among Philadelphia’s prominent families. Other than Wyck, they’ve all been lost to industrial development, neglect, or simply the changing tastes of gardeners.

Against the odds

The garden’s survival wasn’t an accident.

“The family had that quintessential Quaker outlook,” says Juday, who helped document its history. “They felt so connected to their family history, and they had a real reverence for what their ancestors had accomplished. So through- out the decades, they never changed things that their forbearers had put in place.”

So even when formal rose gardens fell out of fashion, which had largely happened by the 1850s and 60s, Wyck’s was never renovated. So the plants kept growing.

“It’s significant that it’s a rose garden,” Juday says. “Because if it were any other kind of garden, a dahlia garden or a gladiola garden, even if they kept the design intact, the garden itself would be long gone. These roses just don’t die.”

By the early 1970s, the family was no longer living in the house full-time, and the garden went wild. The roses had spread like brambles, runners threading under the gravel paths, varieties mingling together until the original plan was completely grown over.

That’s when two volunteer rosarians, Leonie Bell and Doug Seidel, discovered something that stopped them cold. Plants put in more than a century earlier were still there, still alive. Several varieties considered extinct were growing at Wyck, and nowhere else. They immediately realized how significant it was.

And then they got to work. They untangled the roses, replanted them, and used Jane Bowne Haines’s original 1820s notes and layout sketches to reconstruct the garden as she originally designed it.

“The museum world at the time didn’t really appreciate how rare this garden was,” Juday says. “These hobbyist rosarians got excited about it and figured it out themselves. Without them, this history might have been lost.”

Every specimen of those rediscovered varieties now in commercial cultivation descends from plants in this garden.

The restoration

Andrew Palewski has been chair of Wyck’s building and grounds committee for 15 years, and before that, worked on a previous exterior restoration in the mid-1990s. The $1.23 million project that wrapped up this spring, led by conservator Andrew Fearon of Heritage Conservation Collective, addressed what decades of weather had done to the exterior: failing stucco, deteriorating windows and limewash long past due. More than 700 individual panes of historic glass were carefully removed, cataloged, and reset.

The goal was not to return the house to any single period, but to conserve the choices made across three centuries.

At the back of the property, for instance, there’s a section of picket fence between the smokehouse and the kitchen where one post is a rough-hewn log, clearly dragged in from somewhere and dropped into place as a quick fix. It doesn’t match the rest of the fence.

“That’s what they used to fix it,” Palewski says. “This whole building is a living example of how life just doesn’t really happen perfectly. Sometimes you fix things with what you have.”

And then there are the roses, which have their own value – and their own needs. Waterproofing the foundation would have meant pulling up the historic brick paving to install a membrane underneath. That would have solved the rising damp that has been wicking up through the walls since the stucco went on. But it would also have killed the roses.

“One of the compromises that has been made at Wyck,” Palewski says, “is to tolerate some of the damage done by rising damp.”

So the roses stay. And so does the damp.

In July of 2023, someone vandalized one of Wyck’s most historic roses, snapping off the canes that grew up along its masonry wall. News crews showed up. People who had never heard of Wyck came to see the damaged plant, stayed to look around, and didn’t want to leave.

Wyck gardeners did their best, and in 2024, the rose struggled to survive. Then last summer, they got a bloom. This spring, the rose is back to its old self.

“It’s the ultimate comeback story,” Staub says. “It’s actually a nice metaphor for Wyck itself.”

Wyck is located at 6026 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia. The garden is open free of charge Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., through November. wyck.org.