Ardmore -- Sears Garden

Thomas Warren Sears (b.1880-1966) was a landscape architect who said his own garden in Ardmore, Pennsylvania was his favorite, and the formal style of his garden became his trademark design for private residences. The garden center was a sunken rectangular lawn, surrounded by low stone walls, terraces and flagstone walkways that were planted with a mixture of shrubs, perennial flowers, and ground covers, and separated from the stone house by a screen of trees. A tall stone wall at the end of the garden had a fountain inset.

Thomas Sears' formal garden was planted with more than fifty varieties of French lilacs, peonies and irises.

Sears was among the first landscape architects with a formal education, receiving the BS degree from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1906. During his professional career as a landscape architect Sears worked primarily in Maryland, North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. He designed private gardens in the style of his own: sunken rectangular lawns with perennial and shrub borders that surmounted low walls and steps. Among his prominent commissions were Reynolda, home of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the formal gardens Sears laid out in 1916 were later added to the campus of Wake Forest University; the amphitheater at Swarthmore College in 1942; Balmuckety in Pikesville, Maryland, placed on the Baltimore County Historic register in 1988; and the restoration of the Colonial Revival gardens at Pennsbury in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Sears was also known for his published photographs of gardens and natural settings in the US and other countries.

Persons associated with the garden include Thomas Warren Sears (former owner and landscape architect, ca.1930?-1960s) and Ella D. Finney (former owner, ca. 1930s?-1960s?).