Sometimes you buy a house for the house. We bought ours for everything growing around it.
Every once in a while, an old article pops back up and reminds me why I started writing Yard and Garden Secrets in the first place. Recently, one of my personal favorites resurfaced in search: Historic Vintage Gardens of a 1928 Missouri Home. I originally published it in 2012, and seeing it again brought back the story behind those gardens and everything I did to learn more about them.
But our story with these gardens really began in 2004, when we bought the property. The funny thing is, we didn't really buy it for the house. The house needed tremendous repair and was bordering on teardown territory rather than being what most people would call a fixer-upper. We bought it for the land, the gardens, the old trees and the wildlife that already called this place home.
We didn't fall in love with the house.
We fell in love with everything growing around it.
🌳 We Bought the Gardens, Not the House
At first, tearing down the house and rebuilding seemed like the practical answer. We talked with several excavators about what demolition would involve, and that was when our thinking changed. We were told that getting the necessary equipment onto the property could require removing some of the nearly 100-year-old trees and would put the historic gardens at risk.
Then there was the wildlife. Birds were nesting in those trees, bats and squirrels were living here, and the land was already home to an entire little community that had been here long before us. When we considered what demolition might do to the gardens, trees and wildlife, we realized it simply wasn't something we wanted to do. Instead, we took on the much bigger job of restoring the house.
🔍 Then I Got Curious About the History
Once we were living here, I wanted to know who had created these gardens and how much of what we were seeing had survived from the property's earlier years. I started talking with elderly neighbors who remembered pieces of its history and some of the people who had lived here before us.
I really enjoyed those conversations. It became a little neighborhood history project for me as I listened to people's memories and tried to piece together the story behind the gardens. There are things you can learn from old records, but there are other little pieces of history that survive simply because somebody remembers them.
My curiosity eventually took me to city information, old records and blueprints as I tried to learn more about the house itself. Its design reminded me of some of the catalog homes being built during that period, so I began looking for an original plan that might match ours. I found similarities, but never the blueprint that would let me conclusively identify the house. That little part of its history remains a mystery, and honestly, that's part of the fun of owning an old home.
Sometimes you find the answer.
Sometimes an old house simply gives you another mystery. 🔍
🧱 The Garden Had Clues of Its Own
The property itself offered plenty of clues. There were old stone steps, brick pathways, different levels to the gardens and a wonderful river-rock wall. One of my favorite stories came from elderly neighbors who told me about the original homeowner bringing rocks up from the creek by wagon to build that wall.
I loved hearing that story because suddenly I wasn't simply looking at an old garden wall. I could picture someone decades earlier hauling those rocks and creating something that I was now gardening beside. Those are the little pieces of history that make an old garden so fascinating to me.
Someone created these gardens long before we arrived.
We simply became the next caretakers.
🌸 Adding Our Own Chapter
Over the years, we added our own gardens, paths and wildlife-friendly areas while trying to respect what was already here. Gardens aren't museums, and I never wanted this one to become one. Plants change, trees grow, wildlife comes and goes, and each person who cares for a garden eventually leaves a little something behind.
I've come to think of us as simply the next caretakers in a story that began long before we arrived. We didn't begin the story of these gardens. We inherited the next chapter and eventually added a little of our own.
📖 One of My Favorite Articles Resurfaced
All of that investigating eventually inspired one of my favorite articles on Yard and Garden Secrets, Historic Vintage Gardens of a 1928 Missouri Home, which I published in 2012 with my photographs and some of the history I had uncovered.
Recently, I was surprised to see the article appearing in Google search again after not seeing it there for years. Finding it again felt a little like opening an old photo album. I could go back today and rewrite every sentence, polish it and make it sound more like something I'd publish now, but I don't really want to.
It sounds like me in 2012, excited about the history I was discovering in my own backyard, and I think there's something rather nice about leaving that intact. Sometimes an old blog post doesn't need to be reinvented. It can simply be a snapshot of the garden and the person who wrote about it at that particular moment.
🌿 FROM THE YARD AND GARDEN SECRETS ARCHIVES
Historic Vintage Gardens of a 1928 Missouri Home
One of my favorite garden stories, originally published in 2012 with my photographs and the history I uncovered while getting to know our old Missouri property.
🌿 The House Still Needs Work, But the Gardens Remain
All these years later, I'd love to tell you that our 1928 home is completely restored and beautifully finished, but it isn't. We completed a tremendous restoration only to have a tornado cause extensive damage. Insurance didn't provide enough to complete all the repairs, then illness came along, priorities changed and, well, life simply happened. There is still work to be done on the house today.
Through all of that, however, the gardens have remained my place to step away from everything for a while. I can go outside, walk beneath those old trees, work among the plants, listen to the birds and simply breathe. The same gardens that convinced us to take a chance on a very tired old house in 2004 are still the place I go when I need to destress and find some inner peace.
More than twenty years later, I'm still grateful we chose restoration over demolition.
When I step outside into those gardens, I'm reminded that we protected the part of this property that made us fall in love with it in the first place.
Happy Gardening!
Susan
Susang6 | Yard and Garden Secrets 🌿