Creative Gardens: Explore one Emmaus Gardener's Blossoming Passion

Gardeners will tell you it takes a lot of time and love to really make a garden come to life with the colors and smells of the summer season. Emmaus resident Pat Luftman has been pouring her energy into gardening at her home since 1993. Self-taught, with the help of guidebooks and friends, Luftman has really blossomed into a terrific gardener with a garden that has won numerous awards from the Emmaus Garden Club.

Luftman’s front-yard garden features five separate garden spaces and a myriad of plants, some of which have been blooming each season for years, some of which are new additions to the space, and some of which are annuals that complete the garden, if just for a short time. Luftman loves hydrangeas which produce beautiful, round blue and pink blossoms, and lupines, which have pink and white blossoms in a tear-drop shape. Visitors to Luftman’s garden include the local hummingbirds, who love the red-hued bee balm plant, and butterflies, who love anything colorful.

Always proclaiming “I need more space,” Luftman has gotten creative with her garden over the years, and has recently started practicing “newspaper gardening,” where layers of newspaper are placed on the grass, wetted, and covered with topsoil. The newspaper kills the grass, and a gardener does not have to take the time to dig up more of his yard.

To Luftman, gardening is an obsessive, spiritual experience. She walks the garden each day (early morning is her favorite), tending to it, and watching the progression of growth in her plants. Luftman enjoys the spiritual, earthy experience of planting a small seed in the ground and watching it become something tangible before her eyes.

Editor's Note: Creative Gardens will be an ongoing focus of the Emmaus Patch this summer, as we explore, through photography, both the private and public gardening activities that make Emmaus such a lovely place to spend the summer months.