4 Pittsburgh summer garden tours to inspire your green thumb

Summer garden tours are an idyllic way to while away an afternoon, but they’re feel-good experiences in more ways than one. Much like the gardeners nurturing each plant, each of these organizations nurtures its community by raising money for local causes. 

All tours will go on rain or shine.

Sewickley Civic Garden Council Tour

Lynn Popovich, tour chair for the Sewickley Civic Garden Council’s annual garden tour, wants visitors to treat her event like a lazy afternoon.

“We want people to feel welcome in the gardens, feel comfortable and not rushed,” she says. “This is relaxing and people seem to really enjoy it. We want people to take their time, ask all the questions they want.”

The organization has been putting on the borough’s annual garden tour since 2008, when it took over from the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. The organization brings together four garden clubs throughout the Sewickley area, each of which chooses a garden to sponsor during the event.

“Each garden is really very different this year,” Popovich says.

Highlights include one gardener who hails from Arkansas and has created a garden that reminds her of home. The owner of one East Drive home has worked with several landscapers and gardeners to cultivate an ever-blooming garden “to have something always beautiful when she’s sitting outside,” according to Popovich.

Another garden, tended by a centenarian, was put on the tour “because she realizes it may be her last chance,” says Popovich. The garden has been transformed from a traditional English garden to a native shrub and tree garden “and not a blade of grass in her entire yard.”

While the main tour runs on Saturday, June 15, the Friday evening preview tour will feature wine and hors d’oeuvres. The Quaker Valley High School orchestra will play in one of the gardens that night. 

“We try to make each garden have something different,” Popovich says.

Funds raised through the tour go back into beautifying Sewickley – the Sewickley Civic Garden Council plants and maintains a long stretch of Broad Street, the main drag through town. 

“We’ve been doing that for five years,” Popovich says. “5,222 plants!”

34th Annual Mt. Lebanon Public Library Garden Tour

Mt. Lebanon Public Library has cracked the accessibility conundrum inherent in garden tours, and Covid helped do it. 

“We were able to actually run two virtual garden tours during Covid,” says Marina Nielsen, senior library assistant. “We’ve continued it since the topography in Mt. Lebanon can be difficult for people with mobility issues. We’ve hired a professional photographer, and she goes around and takes photos of all the gardens.” 

The photos are compiled into a slideshow that is posted on the library’s website in the weeks following the event.

Now in its 34th year, the Mt. Lebanon tour will feature seven gardens. 

“We try to feature gardens that are created by the homeowners, but we also have some done by professional landscapers,” Nielsen says. “I think that’s why it’s popular – because people can walk around and see what it’s possible for them to do in their own gardens.”

One property on the tour, a fully native perennial garden, is tended by a gardener who is blind. According to Nielsen, the garden was created for her by a member of the Mt. Lebanon Nature Conservancy, an organization the library partners with for gardening and conservation-related programming.

Over the history of the event, the tour has raised over $600,000. 

“It’s one of the vital fundraisers that we run here,” Nielsen says.

Like all the tours on this list, the Mt. Lebanon tour runs rain or shine. Nielsen says the inclement weather doesn’t seem to stop people. 

“My husband and I were on the garden tour in 2014, and we had people coming even when it was raining,” she says. “Gardeners are intrepid people.”

Shaler Garden Club Annual Great Gardens Tour

The Shaler Garden Club’s Annual Great Gardens Tour wouldn’t exist without the Shaler North Hills Library.

“It all started with [Director] Sharon McRae at the library,” says Karen Reilly, garden club member and past chair of the tour.  “She decided she’d like to have a garden contest and that was the beginning of having a garden tour.”

The library holds an annual Great Gardens Contest that’s judged by members of the garden club.

“That’s how we hope to glean a garden or two for the following year,” Reilly says. Some gardeners are invited to participate, and others simply volunteer.

This year’s tour, now in its 16th year, will feature five gardens.

“We try to have a variety of styles – something for everyone,” Reilly says. “Different hardscape ideas or water features, sustainability ideas. Formal, whimsical, retreat, and the kind of gardens that are entertaining as well.

“One gardener overlaps bloom times so there’s always something for the pollinators. We call that ecologically centered gardening.”

One goal of the garden club is to educate members of the local community. 

“We are starting to provide learning sessions at Shaler North Hills Library on how to garden, what to plant,” Reilly says. It’s a goal shared by the garden tour as well.

“We have more than just ‘pretty’ behind what we do,” Reilly says. “You’re not only going on a garden tour because it’s eye candy for your gardener brain; we also want to educate people about different tools and techniques.

“We want to delight people and also motivate and educate and inspire.”

Swissvale Edible Garden Tour

“Grassroots” is perhaps the best – and literal – word to describe the Swissvale Edible Garden Tour, now in its sixth year. 

“A group of us thought it would be a good idea to have a community event,” says Laura Kuster, co-organizer of the tour and a member of Swissvale Area Gardening Enthusiasts. “A lot of us are gardeners here; a lot of us bought our houses so we could have backyards. During the pandemic, we did it from the sidewalk and called it the ‘nebby neighbor tour.’”

This “casual, chatty garden tour,” as Kuster dubs it, has only one parameter for participating gardeners: “that they grow something edible, whether it’s vegetable, medicinal, herbal, etc. Our focus is always food access as well as community building.”

As for Kuster’s own garden? “I like a 50-50 mix of food and flowers, so I like all the beautiful tomatoes, but also cut flowers for bringing inside, like zinnias,” she says.

The tour has two parts: Open Gardens time, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m., when all gardeners will be at their property to chat, and a community picnic on the grounds of the Swissvale Farmer’s Market later in the afternoon. 

There is no cost to attend the tour. 

“It’s really important to us that it’s always free,” Kuster says. “We have sponsors and donors that cover our cost.” 

The organizers donate any remaining proceeds to a community project; this year’s funds will go to the Carnegie Free Library of Swissvale for a new elevator.

“We like it to be really casual,” Kuster says of the tour she helped to co-found. “We want people to get inspired for their own gardens and get to know each other. Gardeners like to talk to each other, and this is a chance to do that.”

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