Ladew Topiary Gardens and Pleasant Valley House
Harford County, Harford County, Maryland
Marker Inscription
Henry Scarff acquired land here about 1747 and soon built a four-room house. Descendants added the three story central section by 1849. Harvey S. Ladew bought the house and property known as Pleasant Valley Farm from a Scarff descendant in 1929. Ladew add… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
The oldest part of this house went up around 1747, when Henry Scarff settled a Maryland farm and raised a modest four-room dwelling; generations of his descendants enlarged it, adding the tall central block by 1849. In 1929 Harvey S. Ladew, a wealthy sportsman and self-taught gardener, bought the old Scarff place—then called Pleasant Valley Farm—and set about transforming its grounds into one of America's most celebrated topiary gardens, sculpting hedges and yews into fanciful shapes still admired today.
Why it matters
The property links two very different American stories on one patch of Maryland ground—an ordinary colonial farmstead that grew across a century, and its twentieth-century rebirth as a nationally renowned work of garden artistry.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This spot tells its story in layers, the way an old house tells its story in additions. The earliest chapter belongs to colonial Maryland in the mid-1700s, when much of this rolling countryside was being cleared and settled by farming families staking a claim to a life on the land.
Around 1747, Henry Scarff acquired ground here and built a small four-room house — the kind of practical, unpretentious dwelling that dotted the colonial landscape. There was nothing grand about it. It was a working farmstead, meant to shelter a family and anchor a life of planting, harvesting, and getting by season to season.
What makes this place unusual is that the story didn't stop there. Over the following century the Scarff family stayed, and the house grew with them, gaining a tall three-story central section by 1849. To read those additions is to watch generations of one American family put down roots and build outward, brick by brick and beam by beam.
People & events
For nearly two centuries this was, first and foremost, a family's home. Henry Scarff's descendants worked and expanded it across the decades, and the enlarged house standing today is a record of their long tenure — colonial modesty at its core, wrapped in the ambitions of later generations.
Then, in 1929, the property changed hands and changed character. Harvey S. Ladew, a wealthy sportsman and largely self-taught gardener, bought the old Scarff place — then known as Pleasant Valley Farm — from a Scarff descendant. Where earlier owners had shaped the house, Ladew set out to shape the land itself.
With an artist's eye and a great deal of patience, he began transforming the grounds into elaborate topiary — hedges and evergreens clipped and trained into sculptural forms. Over the years the gardens he created here grew into one of the most celebrated topiary landscapes in the country, a place where living plants are coaxed into shapes that delight and surprise.
Its place in the American story
What gives this ground its wider meaning is the way it braids together two very different American impulses on a single patch of Maryland earth.
The first is the ordinary story of settlement and endurance — a colonial family building a plain house and then, across a hundred years, enlarging it as their fortunes and needs grew. Multiply that quiet pattern across thousands of farmsteads and you have the making of much of rural America.
The second is a distinctly American kind of reinvention: a twentieth-century owner with the means and imagination to turn a working farm into a work of living art. The transformation of a modest agricultural property into a nationally admired garden speaks to a long American habit of self-made passion projects — of taking an inherited place and making it into something entirely new, and beautiful, and open to be shared.
If you visit
Come at this place with two sets of eyes. With one, watch the house — see if you can read its history in its shape, the small early core giving way to the taller section added generations later. Old buildings like this are honest about their age if you look closely.
With the other, take in the grounds, where the real surprise waits. Topiary rewards a slow, wandering pace: let yourself notice how ordinary shrubs have been trained into forms that feel almost playful, and think about the years of patient clipping that any single shape represents.
On a road trip, this is a lovely change of tempo — a green, unhurried stop where history and horticulture sit side by side. It's especially good with children, who tend to spot the whimsy in the hedges before adults do, and with anyone who likes the idea that a plain old farm can be reimagined into something worth traveling to see.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Henry Scarff
- · Harvey S. Ladew
Themes & tags
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