Mt. Lebanon home to gardeners
Municipality gears up for annual tour
Home is where their hearts are, and Jan Loney and Gretchen White can’t wait to show off their properties during the Mt. Lebanon Public Library Garden Tour. The 35th annual event, showcasing eight gardens, will be held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 22.
A Cleveland native, Loney rowed competitively at Marietta (Ohio) College while majoring in art and business before settling in Mt. Lebanon to raise a family. She has two children, Jack, 19, and Lilly, 15. A graduate of Shaker Heights High School and the Cleveland Institute of Art, Loney has specialized in metal artistry and jewelry making since she was 16. Her sculptures and commissioned art will be on display in her garden. Pieces can also be viewed at metalier.com or in her studio, which she recently opened in Lawrenceville.
“It’s amazing to think of four decades of creating, but it’s a great life. There’s a lot in nature that I find inspires me,” Loney said.
Because Mt. Lebanon reminded her of Shaker Heights, Loney moved into her 100-year-old Dutch Colonial Revival-styled home nearly two decades ago.
“It felt a lot like home,” she said. “Shaker Heights is the Mt. Lebanon of Cleveland. Great schools. Close to but a little bit away from the city. Like-minded people. They have everything here. The recreation center, swimming pool, all the facilities. They recognize the arts and not just sports,” she added, noting her son was in the percussion program at the high school.
Mt. Lebanon also offered White a perfect place to reside. She grew up in Central New York, in the Finger Lakes region, before she gravitated to West Virginia. While working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Morgantown, she met Briggs White. He was from Sharpsburg where the Civil War Battle at Antietam took place in Maryland and was working for the Department of Energy.
The couple relocated to Upper St. Clair while White earned her doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh, where she currently is employed. They moved to Mt. Lebanon five years ago with their daughter, Louisa, 7, and son, Simon, 7.
Of their USC abode, White said, “It was not our forever house. I think this one is.”
The grounds make the residence special.
“We love gardening, and we garden a lot as a family,” said White as she pointed out patio planters her children created. “The last couple of years we bought tickets and attended the garden tour because we love looking at other people’s gardens and getting ideas. It really energizes us in our own house.”
Gretchen and Briggs were so inspired that they redesigned their entire front yard. After losing a 100-year-old elm, they consulted with Mt. Lebanon native Abi Falcioni from Perrioco Gardens.
Though a “little bit overwhelmed” they did much of the work themselves implementing the design that would incorporate plenty of native plants and perennials. After a contractor cleared the hillside and put in the boulders, the duo planted hundreds of plants, even though Gretchen was in a boot cast because of a broken foot.
“We went from mostly shade to full sun and we had a bunch of invasive plants that were on the hill when we bought the house,” Gretchen said. “The hard work of tearing out all the ivy and clearing the hillside was done by the contractor. So we began with a clean slate.
“It was a team effort,” she continued. “(Briggs) would dig the holes and I would put the plants in. We were very deliberate in doing this.”
The front yard is the showpiece of the house. It features an abundance of salvia, lupine, allium and echinacea as well as a serviceberry tree.
“We’re doing our best to transition all the garden to having native plants that have low water requirements and are good for pollinators, bees, butterflies, and birds. We’re on our way,” Briggs said.
“Our goal with this garden, we wanted to not have to be out here watering grass every day and we wanted three seasons of color.”
Gretchen added the family wanted plants of varying heights and different shapes that were both deer resistant and drought tolerant.
“We love it,” she said of the finished product. “What’s awesome is there’s always something blooming up there. We also leave the seed heads on the flowers so in the fall and winter we’ll see lots of birds. And there’s bees out there pollinating all the time.”
Because they live on a corner lot, Gretchen and Briggs have two side gardens and a backyard patio surrounded by large hemlock trees and hydrangeas, where the children tend a fairy garden. They grow tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in the ground as well as onions, lettuce, radishes, snap peas and herbs in planter boxes. Arranged around the permeable patio are also plants and flowers in clay pots, some crafted by Briggs’ father.
“He had a herb farm and was selling into wholesale markets. When he couldn’t make enough money, he focused on his pottery,” Briggs said. “He was a potter so he focused his time on that. We grow the herbs mainly for culinary purposes. They remind us of my dad as well as a couple of the pots we have around here that he made.”
Gretchen and Briggs don’t claim to have the “perfect garden,” but they are living an idyllic life, especially with their children.
“Since we have gotten out of college and actually had land of our own to garden, we have really enjoyed doing it together,” Briggs said. “Now, we really enjoy gardening as a family. That’s another great takeaway.”
For Loney, the garden is the right spot for both her sculptures and lush plants. With the use of her artistry, she transformed her landscape from a grassy bunny-sloped front yard into an oasis of green. When she moved into the house in 2010, she said it “looked very much like” the neighbors until three truckloads of boulders were unloaded and arranged in a C shape around the house.
“It’s undergone a huge transformation because I really wanted to connect the house with the yard and the landscape around it.,” Loney said. “I’ve tried to minimize the amount of grass and allow for native plants.”
There’s milkweed to attract monarch butterflies mixed in with the perennials of daisies, asters, coneflowers and rudbeckia, also known as Black-eyed Susan. There’s moonflowers and other blooms propagated from cuttings to complement coral bells, Jacob’s Ladder, Hostas and Hellebores. Look closely and one will find trillium and Jack-in-the-pulpit.
“I kind of go for the Pennsylvania native woodland feel,” Loney said. “I tend to let things grow,and I’m always moving things around.”
Loney’s backyard is a shady peaceful place with a wide range of plants from rhubarb to oak-leaf hydrangeas. There are trees she planted, including a Japanese maple, twin pawpaw trees for their “interesting” fruit, as well as a hemlock along with a cedar sapling and arborvitae.
“It really is my sanctuary back here,” she said. “I mean, I love just sitting out here and thinking, reading, creating. I’ve always felt a deep connection to the outdoors.”
Loney’s sculptures are deeply connected to the region. Stained-glass, colored bricks can be found on the property as well as parts of a commissioned piece she created while in residency at the Carrie Furnace. The bricks were created as a collaboration between the Pittsburgh Glass Centre and the Chartiers Valley School District. Her work titled “Flight” was a tribute to Pittsburgh and its steel heritage.
“It was about how people migrated to different cities during the industrial times and the expansion and all of the people that came from all over the world to work in these blast furnaces,” she said. “People really flocked to Pittsburgh, to pursue a life and a career and then how in the ’80s, their livelihood and that whole industry fell apart and everybody kind of flew away and migrated elsewhere.”
Loney, however, moved to Pittsburgh and has adopted the city’s resilience and flexibility into her gardening philosophy.
“When in doubt, I let it grow,” she said.
“I’m really excited to show my pieces as well as my garden. It’s home. To me, Mt. Lebanon has always been home.”
Tickets for the Mt. Lebanon garden tour can be purchased in person at the library or online at mtlebanonlibrary.org. Cost is $20 ($25 the day of the event). A virtual garden tour will be posted online within two weeks of the live event.