The Power of a Garden's Entrance
A latch clicks quietly and a heavy wooden door, set into a solid brick wall, swings silently open on well-greased hinges. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not have captured the moment more eloquently, except that in her classic, The Secret Garden, the scene on the other side revealed a tangle of unkempt foliage.

If Burnett's secret garden was the "before," the garden on the other side of this elegant entrance, on a quiet Squirrel Hill street, is definitely the "after." Richly designed and beautifully planted, this garden is a treasure. Its architect took masterful command of the entrance experience and created a garden worthy of it.

From the vantage point of the door, the elegant curves of the garden are laid out in "plan view." Only on a slope-which Pittsburgh does so well-could this scene be enacted, and re-enacted again and again, each time a visitor enters.

The owner smiles. After living in, and with, this magnificent space for 35 years, she's still keenly aware of the power of the garden's entrance to entrance.

It was the late Margaret Winters, a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and principal in the Pittsburgh firm of Griswold, Winters, Swain and Mullin (later to become GWSM Inc.), who first envisioned this scene, sketched it on paper, then executed it in vivid detail on the ground. The garden's integrity is still carefully maintained and joyfully "lived in." Minor adjustments to the plant palette are occasionally necessary to accommodate the natural aging process of the garden.

Somewhere, Margaret Winters is smiling, too. The partnership forged between her and the owners of this lovely garden lives on, reinforced every time someone discovers-or rediscovers-the grand entrance they created together.

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