A ‘secret garden’ in Wayne

Headlights from westbound cars beamed in the window and through the first floor of the house Mark and Cynthia Dixon bought in 1989 on a busy street in Wayne.

When the first of their two daughters arrived a year later, blocking the house from that traffic became a more urgent need.

So Mark created “a secret garden” by installing a fence and a yew hedge around the wedge-shaped yard, which he gradually filled with hosta, ferns, oak leaf hydrangea, azaleas, spice plants, and daylilies. A large viburnum shrub blooms with globes of white flowers from April through May.

When he and his wife purchased the two-thirds-of-an-acre property, Mark said, it consisted of grass, weeds, six dead Norway spruce, and a towering red oak tree.

Work on the federal-style house took precedence over landscaping. Paint was peeling from stucco on the section built in 1816.

Mark scraped the stucco, sealed it, and repainted it. He then pulled out hundreds of staples to strip aluminum siding from the home’s 1880 and 1942 additions and exposed cedar siding. He hung shutters found in a salvage yard and replaced the covered front porch that had fallen off years before.

The stucco and siding was painted blue and the shutters and porch cream. Window trim and exterior doors are a deep red.

Inside the four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, plumbing needed repairs and updates. Installing air-conditioning was a priority for Cynthia, who had endured years of hot weather in Texas.

She grew up in Philadelphia and in Texas. Mark grew up in Michigan.

The couple met in Texas where she was a practicing attorney and he was a writer for a trade publication. They married in 1983 and moved east in 1987.

The Dixons remodeled bathrooms and the kitchen and in 2000 built their own addition — a family room with a bay window.

A bell hanging from a wooden post greets friends and family who use the entrance off the driveway. The bell came from Cynthia’s grandparents’ farm in Concord Township, Delaware County.

In late April, two redbud trees and a pink dogwood in full bloom greet visitors. Buds on three purple lilacs are ready to burst, as are the crimson flowers of the honeysuckle vine draping a trellis on the oldest section of the house.

Mark buys plants from Conestoga Nursery in Lancaster County and from catalogs. He has learned landscaping skills, he said, by “trial and error.”

To construct a patio, he laid flagstone over sand. When the stones became wobbly, he hired professionals to set them in concrete.

In the mid 1990s when a neighbor offered fill from the installation of a backyard swimming pool, Mark accepted. Borrowing the swimming pool contractor’s Bobcat and its operator, he had the dirt spread over a low area near the driveway. With the help of a plan ordered from House & Garden magazine, he created a terraced garden. His then 5-year-old daughter helped paint a white arbor with a swing.

Gardens need hardscaping — nonliving elements like the farmhouse bell and the arbor — for a complete landscape design, Mark learned. The porch, too, is furnished with wrought iron tables, upholstered chairs, and a wood bench he constructed from a kit.

A sculpture of a one-winged angel perches on a stone planter. Mark found the bird bath with a pineapple motif in the “secret garden” on Facebook Marketplace.

After the red oak tree died five years ago, the garden was left without a center of gravity. Mark built a stone plinth topped with a planter, and it helped, he said, “though I’d still rather have the tree back.”

As May approached, blue enameled pots from Main Line Gardens sat waiting to be filled with annuals Mark planned to purchase in Lancaster County.

He had been hoping for elephant ears and coleus but ended up with coleus, celosia, and “something blue.” He sprayed the filled pots with deer repellent.

“Fingers crossed,” he said. “Living things have a mind of their own. I would prefer my own way, but that’s not gardening.”

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