Hershey Gardens has a new director of horticultural operations who trained at Longwood Gardens, earned a master’s degree in garden history in London, and has a keen appreciation for Milton Hershey’s love of plants.
Deb Wiles comes to Hershey from Orange, Texas, where she’s spent the last six years as senior horticulturist at the Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center.
Her job at Hershey is a new one, created in the wake of several recent retirements to oversee all of the Gardens’ day-to-day, plant-related operations. That includes the indoor Milton and Catherine Hershey Conservatory and Butterfly Atrium, as well as the 23 acres of outdoor gardens.
Wiles has no immediate to-do list, though.
She says her mentor in England told her it can take five years to really know a garden, so she plans to spend at least a full season observing before making any substantial changes.
“My art teacher always posed three questions to ask ourselves when critiquing our own or another’s work: 1) What’s working? 2) What’s not? and 3) What can we improve?” says Wiles. “These are the questions I’m asking as the season and displays transition from summer to fall and again from fall to winter. It will take a full year of seeing the Gardens through all seasons to be able to distill those notes into an action plan.”
Another key question she plans to ask is one that usually still reverberates through all of the entities created by the town’s founder: What would Mr. Hershey do?
“The legacy left by Milton Hershey is one I admire,” Wiles says. “Most men of his wealth and stature created gardens for themselves, which they may have opened to the public occasionally. While the Hersheys did have their own garden at High Point, Mr. Hershey believed enough in creating places of beauty and enjoyment for the community that he built the garden here and always intended it for public use.
“He obviously had a vision and a passion for creating a beautiful community with places for everyone to enjoy.”
Wiles, a native of southern California, started coming to Hershey Gardens after she left a corporate career and enrolled in Longwood Gardens’ Professional Gardener program.
After graduating from that, she interned at England’s world-famous Great Dixter House and Gardens, going on to earn her garden-history master’s degree at the University of Greenwich in London.
While in England, she visited public gardens throughout that country, as well as in Scotland and Spain. Adding the U.S. to the mix, Wiles guesstimates that she’s visited hundreds of public gardens in her 25 years in the horticulture field.
Besides her most recent stint at Shangri La in Texas, Wiles has worked for a landscape design firm in Los Angeles, as head gardener at a private estate in Virginia, as estate gardener at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, and at the Reeves-Reed Arboretum in New Jersey.
The one job Wiles has tackled so far is organizing the Gardens’ plant records.
She says that properly documenting and managing the thousands of plants in Hershey’s collection “is important for supporting our mission as a public garden, for plant conservation and research, for monitoring the health of different species, for educating the community, and for sharing knowledge and sometimes specimens with other institutions.”
Eventually, she suspects the Gardens will need to undergo some plant revamping.
“The permanent plants in our collections will naturally mature and need a regimen of care appropriate to their species and age,” says Wiles. “Some shrubs and trees that were planted or already here when the Gardens opened in the 1930s may be nearing the end of their life spans or may succumb to disease and need to be removed.
“New plants will be added, and some that are sensitive to the changing climate will need to be rethought while plants more suited to our zone will need to be considered,” she adds. “No garden is static, nor can it be planted once then sealed in aspic. Gardens are ever-changing, and nature is always evolving. My hope is to maintain the beauty of the Gardens for the coming generations as Mr. Hershey intended.”
Wiles says she has been impressed so far with the knowledge of the existing Gardens staff.
“They really know their stuff,” she says. “Whether it be the level of horticulture knowledge and design ability or the mechanical and engineering skills needed in the gardens, or the zoological expertise in the Butterfly Atrium, everyone is passionate and has mad skills in so many different areas that, combined, they make the Gardens magical.”
Wiles says she hasn’t yet zeroed in on a favorite plant or a favorite spot in the Gardens, “but I have to say the early morning view from the top of the rose garden is pretty fantastic!”
Hershey Gardens is located on the hill above Hersheypark at 170 Hotel Road and is open through the end of the year daily from 9 a.m.to 5 p.m., except closing at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve and closed altogether on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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