Point Pleasant Couple Transforms Bamboo- and Poison-Ivy Choked Plot to the Pristine Gardens at Mill Fleurs

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Barbara Tiffany’s husband, Robert, had his heart set on a 10,500-square-foot space in Point Pleasant, near the Delaware River. He saw potential. His wife saw a plot so in need of effort that her reaction to its purchase was: “Over my dead body.” FOX 29 Philadelphia dug up the story of how they acquired the property and transformed it into the Gardens at Mill Fleurs.

Barbara describes her present ornamental garden in glowing terms. But she wasn’t always so complimentary.

“It was pretty rustic,” she remembers.

The task of rehabbing the site was herculean. The Tiffanys dug out invasive bamboo. And beat back monstrous poison ivy.

“Poison ivy’s a vine and it climbs up trees to support itself,” Barbara said. “And [the one] tree, [on which] this particular poison ivy had climbed up, had long since disappeared. You could see the stump. It had rotted away.

“The poison ivy had a [big] trunk. Hairy. Terrifying. It was supporting itself on tendrils that [were] propping it up against the ground,” she described.

Eventually, the residence and its garden were transformed. Barbara filled the property with plants she found “interesting.”

Now, through collaboration with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the public is welcome to come and behold.

More on the Gardens of Mill Fleurs is at FOX 29 Philadelphia.

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