Thoughtful Garden Design & Hardscaping for Elevated Residential Properties
Bruce Gangawer spent more than two decades as the lead designer and horticulturist behind Paxson Hill Farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania, one of Bucks County's most visited walking gardens until its closing in 2024. During that time, he built a reputation for landscapes that feel discovered rather than constructed, gardens where structure and craft are present but never obvious.
That approach defines his work today. Bruce's design philosophy centers on natural form: allowing a property's existing character to guide the plan, rather than imposing a fixed style onto it. He works comfortably across formal gardens, naturalistic plantings, water features, and structural elements, adapting to each property while keeping that same underlying sense of composition.
Paxson Hill Garden Design brings that experience to residential properties throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, offering full landscape design, hardscaping, and installation for homeowners who want their property treated with the same level of care.
Our Expertise
Landscaping
Every planting plan starts with the property itself: its light, soil, and existing character. The result is a landscape designed to mature well over time, not just look complete on installation day. Whether the goal is a naturalistic garden or a more formal planting scheme, each design is built around what the site actually supports.
Natural Garden Design
Bruce's design approach centers on the plants themselves: how they're layered, how they change through the seasons, and how a homeowner actually moves through and lives in the space day to day. Rather than a landscape built around a single moment, each garden is planned for color and interest across the full year, so there's always something coming into bloom as something else fades. The goal is a landscape that feels considered from every window and every path, not just from the street.
The Paxson Hill Farm Legacy
From 1997 to 2024, Paxson Hill Farm was a working nursery and thirty acre garden in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and one of the most visited destinations in the area. It was never a formal attraction built for tourists. It grew, quite literally, out of a genuine plant nursery, one filled with rare perennials, dwarf conifers, and unusual trees and shrubs that drew serious gardeners from well beyond the region.
Bruce Gangawer spent more than twenty years as the farm's lead designer and horticulturist, shaping the walking gardens that grew up around that nursery. Visitors wandered through formal garden rooms, shaded woodland paths, and a series of ponds connected by bridges and a moon gate, often stumbling onto something unexpected around the next turn: a hedge maze, a bell garden, peacocks and goats moving freely across the grounds.
The farm became a true community gathering place. Its annual Art in the Garden show brought dozens of regional artists to display their work among the plantings, and regular garden tours introduced new visitors to the property season after season. For many families in the area, a trip to Paxson Hill Farm was an annual tradition.
Paxson Hill Farm closed in 2024. What made it special was never just the acreage or the sculpture. It was a genuine plantsman's eye for what makes a garden worth returning to again and again, plant by plant, season by season. That same eye is what Bruce brings to every residential garden today.
Paxson Hill Garden Design continues that tradition, planted somewhere new.
Inquiry
6 Marienstein Rd,
Ottsville, PA 18942
Call:
(445) 448-9227
Email: bruce@paxsonhill.com