The gardens of Chestnut Hill grow not just from soil, but from stone, anchored by the native Wissahickon schist that makes the region unmistakably its own.

“This stuff is plentiful. It’s easy to work with. It’s beautiful,” said garden historian Nicole Juday, referring to the locally quarried stone that defines many homes and garden walls in Northwest Philadelphia. “It’s something that really makes Philadelphia look like Philadelphia.”

Juday, who moved to the region from Illinois nearly 30 years ago, shared this reflection during her April 9 lecture for the Chestnut Hill Conservancy’s Discovering Chestnut Hill series. Titled Private Gardens of Philadelphia – Lost and Found, the event brought together neighbors, designers and garden-lovers to explore what it means to make, and keep, a garden—and how gardens can become one of the quiet forces that turn a house into a home by creating a sense of place.

“Philadelphia really takes gardening to the highest level,” Juday said. “What we tried to do in this book is to show the many ways that can be expressed.” 

Her book, created with photographer Rob Cardillo, features gardens that range from long-tended historic landscapes to newer plantings designed by their current owners.

One of the many resonant examples featured in the talk was Krisheim, a 19th-century estate perched above Wissahickon Valley. Designed in part by the Olmsted Brothers, the landscape surrounding the house is subtle, quiet and intentionally deferential to nature.

“The Woodwards were very clear when this garden was being built,” Juday said. “This is not a flower garden... It wasn't supposed to distract from nature. It was supposed to enhance it, become invisible, so that you would appreciate the natural environment even more than you would have if this weren't here.”

Rob Fleming, a landscape architect and Conservancy board member, agreed, noting, “the interesting thing about the garden is that it was completely lost, the pools filled in, no plants. Just a very solid infrastructure in which to put the plants and water back.”

Water features, terraces and steps are nestled gently into the hillside. Shade is given equal importance to sunlight. Flowers are minimal. The entire space reads like a conversation between design and restraint.

Patricia Cove, an interior designer, architectural historian and Conservancy board member, reflected on her earliest professional experience at Krisheim. Her observations mirrored Juday’s.

“Krisheim taught me that architecture, design and landscape are not separate disciplines,” she said. “They are parts of a whole. You walk through that space and feel the intention behind every decision, not just what materials were used, but why they were used. It’s a place where the past isn’t preserved like a museum—it’s lived in, and you can feel that continuity.”

Rediscovery became a quiet theme of Juday’s talk. Several of the gardens featured in the book were hidden beneath overgrowth when their current owners moved in—long dormant but not forgotten.

“When the current owners bought it in 1999, it had been in rough shape,” she said of one garden in Chestnut Hill. “There were stone steps, walls, built-in benches, and even a beautiful fountain that were invisible under the blanket of leaves and debris. It was only when they started clearing that they realized the house had once had a garden.” 

These moments of rediscovery suggest that gardens are more than decoration. They are timekeepers, storytellers and even collaborators. Juday described another garden on a steep slope, transformed into a meadow by a couple—one of whom is a  landscape architect—who let the land lead their design.

“You never see this garden all at once,” she said. “It only reveals itself in sections. And I realized it’s like music. You experience it in moments, and it keeps changing—through the day, season, even year to year.”

For Juday and many in the audience, this temporal quality and slow unfolding are part of what makes gardens such a profound extension of home.

Fleming led the Q&A that followed Juday’s lecture. “We’re so privileged to reside in—or be a part of—such a great, unique community,” he said. “The landscapes here reflect that privilege. But they also require stewardship.” 

Juday noted how fragile that stewardship can be. “These kinds of properties did not last very long,” she said of the multiple Gilded Age estates that once were prominent in the region. “They were built to last a thousand years, but most were torn down in 30, 40, 50 years. The world they were made for didn’t last.” Juday acknowledged the tension between permanence and loss—how gardens, though carefully built, are vulnerable to time, trends, change and development pressures. “They rarely outlive the people that create them,” she noted.

That impermanence is what gives gardens their poignancy. A house may be framed with stone and topped with slate, but it becomes a home through repetition, care and memory—through the intentional act and sense of place. These rituals create rhythm, and that rhythm, comfort.

In Philadelphia’s garden district, gardens mark time not with dates but with blooming cycles and weathered stone. In their evolving beauty, they offer something essential: comfort and a sense of belonging.