The Gardens at Mill Fleurs, Bucks County PA

The Gardens at Mill Fleurs in Bucks County, Pennsylvania is a magical place. Even in January, the plants that are not hibernating are lush and expectant, and the carefully tended and mulched grounds exude good health. And although winter is when you can see the underlying form of each carefully selected and placed tree and shrub, these gardens are really meant to be seen during the other three seasons – spring, summer and fall - when they are literally bursting with color.

This unusual orange azalea is striking in spring.

It took three years for owners Barbara and Tiff Tiffany to find the name Mill Fleurs, a play on words and triple entendre: the gardens share the property with two old mills, a saw mill and a grist mill that used to grind different grains into flour; and mille fleurs means "a thousand flowers" in French. Mille fleurs is also a glass blowing technique commonly seen in old fashioned jewelry and paperweights that look like they are made of groups of tiny glass flowers.

You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy the Gardens at Mill Fleurs. While each individual tree, shrub and plant is a marvel in itself, and each border has something unique to say, there are also beautiful pieces of furniture designed by the Tiffanys and fun pieces of old mill machinery artistically scattered around the grounds. The paths also lead over the preserved water raceway that was originally used to channel the water from the creek to run the mill.

Gears from the old mill do double duty as garden art and support for vines.

Barbara Tiffany designs each of the gardens herself, organized by color or collection, with diminutive and unconventional plants that she finds and falls in love with as they speak to her. The Gardens website refers often to hostas, and there are certainly plenty of wonderful and unique hostas to be found as you walk through the gardens, but by no means are the gardens only about hostas. Not even close. Barbara has a passion for what she calls the weird and wonderful and delicious, orphans that need to be taken care of and sometimes turn out to be rare specimens. The stranger the plant, the more her heart connects with it. As she led me past one small shrub, she turned away from it and whispered, "That one is kind of ugly, but I don't want to say it too loud. We don't want to hurt anyone's feelings."

You won't find any grand sweeps of one kind of plant or one flower color, Barbara prefers "onsies", plants that don't look like anything else. Each plant speaks for itself, giving color to the garden it lives in from leaf, needle, bark or flower. The gardens climb a steep hillside up from the creek, held back from erosion by numerous well-placed retaining walls that also create stepped individual gardens up the slopes. Each of the many borders is very busy, very densely planted, with each plant clearly identified by labels designed by Barbara for maximum visibility, minimum impact and greatest longevity. There are birds everywhere, robins searching for earthworms, woodpeckers climbing trees, and hummingbirds flitting around like flying flowers themselves.

The red, white and blue Patriot Garden

 The purpose of the garden has evolved over the years. The initial purpose was to get control of the property. When they first bought the property in the early 1990s, the Tiffanys traded some large, old English boxwoods from the property to a local landscaper who in turn gave them the use of a number of workers from Thailand for three weeks to eradicate the bamboo that invaded the property. Even though eradicating bamboo is a huge and difficult undertaking, the workers loved it. In the afternoons they would sit in the shade by the creek and open up the bamboo stalks to eat the bamboo hearts. After the bamboo was finally gone (bamboo is so invasive that it took years to completely eradicate it), the Tiffanys camped at the mill and took care of the land, creating the gardens before they even started renovations on the house. Barbara simply went to work softening and warming the now-barren land with small, inexpensive plants. "I gave myself permission to become a plant collector," she says, and keeps costs down by only purchasing small or young plants that she lovingly nurtures to their full potential.

The Gardens at Mill Fleurs property has always seemed romantic to people. The grandson of the last miller told the Tiffanys that in 1910, the owners of the mill raised the rent to $50 a month. His grandfather wasn't able to make that much money, so they stopped production and abandoned the mill. The story goes that the entire property was purchased in the 1950s for the price of a set of Chippendale chairs. It was renovated into a bed and breakfast. The Tiffanys first discovered the property when they lived in Lumberville and rented it for visiting friends. "This place has a strange magic," Barbara says. "Everyone who comes here wants to possess it. Everyone except me." When the property came on the market, she didn't want anything to do with it, and even as the price got cheaper and cheaper, and her husband continued to want to buy it, she kept saying no. What would two corporate people in their 50s do with 10,000 square feet of buildings that could only be considered, politely, rustic? That year, the Tiffanys were in California staying at an artists' residence. Tiff spoke of the mill property again, and Barbara thought out loud that maybe they could do something similar to the artists' residence, where people can do creative things. Tiff bought the property that day, not because Barbara said yes, but because it was the first time she didn't say no. And it is an artists' residence of sorts: Barbara and Tiff, an engineer, have been designing and producing furniture together for decades, and the home they've created in the mill buildings is a showcase for their beautiful and comfortable furniture. Barbara designs the gardens, and Tiff takes care of the hardscaping and irrigation systems that keep the gardens thriving. "We make a good team," she says.

The Bronze Border

The first garden on the tour is Yellow, at the top of the property. From here, surrounded by sunshine reflected off the yellow plants, you can see down to the Tohickon Creek and the two mills that make up the Tiffanys' home and offices. The grist mill dates from the 1742, and the original millworks and water raceways are still there. Right next to the grist mill is the saw mill, was operating from the 1790s. Directly up the hill across from the mills is an ice house, where ice from the creek was stored through to July in sawdust from the sawmill. Here is where you will be served refreshments, just like they do on garden tours in England. The refreshments are created with the same love and care that goes into the gardens by Barbara and her staff: fruity Earl Grey sun-tea made with well water, strawberries, muffins with orange-rind butter and gluten-free cookies baked fresh each morning.

As the tour heads down towards the mills, the driveway is flanked by the Pink garden, anchored by a stunning collection of rhododendrons, beautiful through each of the four seasons, in various shades of pink. Continue along past the Bronze Border, where the leaves, flowers or bark of each plant is a burnished deep red; the Tropical garden full of beautiful exotic plants that only thrive in the tropics and need to be brought indoors over the winter; and the Double Department, where all the plants boast frilly double blossoms. The Herb garden with plants for scent and culinary purposes is near the house, and the White garden is filled with not only white flowering plants and shrubs but also many different species of trees with white bark. On the hillside is the red, white and blue Patriot garden, and down by the creek in a raised bed all its own, is the Red garden, newly designed by Joe Novak, Mill Fleurs Head Gardener.

Take a break from looking at one thing at a time and gaze out on the grounds as a whole for an entirely different experience. See how the creek below rushes past the lovely old mill buildings, and how the buildings are echoed by the icehouse up the steep hillside. Expect to spend at least an hour and a half at the Gardens at Mill Fleurs, there is so much to see and learn and marvel at. You can return again and again every few weeks as the seasons change; it will never be the same twice as the colors from some plants fade and are replaced by others coming in to their own.

A bench designed by Tiff sits above the Bog Garden

Whether your tour is lead by Barbara Tiffany or Mill Fleurs Head Gardener Joe Novak, you are sure to come away enchanted and enlightened. Both Joe and Horticulturist Emily Reuther are knowledgeable and engaging, and they adhere to and embody the same fascination with and respect for Barbara's ideas about plants, gardening and the Earth itself. After his first few weeks working with the Tiffanys at the Gardens at Mill Fleurs, Joe was overheard saying, "I've found my tribe." Who wouldn't love an employee like that?

At the end of the tour be sure to visit the Tiffany Perennials store in the greenhouse where you can purchase some of the plants you'll find in the Gardens. Barbara created Tiffany Perennials to share the plants she loves with her visitors. When you come to the Gardens, Barbara says, "I show you all these little treasures, and I tell you all about them, and if you fall in love with something I want to share it with you." When someone asks for a cutting of a plant they've never seen before and have fallen for, she always wants to be able to say "yes". Some of the plants she offers can't be found anywhere else, as she discovered when she went on line to see what others were charging for them, and they simply weren't there. Also available for purchase at Tiffany Perennials is a variety of pachysandra named for Barbara, Pachysandra terminalis 'Tiffany'. It is a diminutive evergreen groundcover with deeply lobed toothy leaves, bright and elegant like Barbara Tiffany herself.

Visits to the Gardens at Mill Fleurs are by guided tour only. All tours will be led by Barbara Tiffany, Designer or Joseph Novak, Head Gardener and Emily Reuther, Horticulturist. They are happy to accommodate groups of any size, from two to a busload, any day of the week. Facilities are available, and refreshments are included with the tour for $22 per person, $100 minimum for groups of five or less.

Since the gardens are complex and extensive, plan to visit for up to two hours, and also allow for some time to visit Tiffany Perennials. Along with natives and other perennials from the garden, you will also find rare and unusual plants, some not available anywhere else.