Harvey Ladew had already lived the good life when in 1928, he bought a 250-acre farm in the Maryland countryside to indulge his passion for fox hunting.
Pleasant Valley Farm, as the white farmhouse was then known, was in pretty bad shape at the time. But that didn’t bother the lifelong bachelor born into the upper reaches of New York society in 1887. He had both inherited wealth from his family’s leather business and a sophisticated eye cultivated by years of extensive travel.
He renovated the manor house into something fabulous, but it was the masterpiece of a garden he worked on for more than four decades that would become his claim to fame.
