Meet the winners of the 2025 Phipps Sustainable Garden Awards from Phipps Conservatory
With such an abundance of wildlife and green space in the Pittsburgh area, it’s no wonder that the region boasts such passionate gardeners. Each year, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens recognizes local green thumbs who have cultivated exceptional outdoor spaces using Phipps’ principles of sustainable land care with the Phipps Sustainable Garden Awards.
This year, awards were given in five categories: Native Plantings and Wildlife Gardens, Gardens that Manage Rainwater, Micro-Gardens, Abundant Edible Gardens and Gardens for Personal Retreat.
The 2025 winners find solace in the beauty of nature and outdoor spaces. They all have long-running stories with their own gardens.
Rosemary Romboski
Gardens for Personal Retreat
Rosemary Romboski’s garden is always a work in progress. For 18 years, she has layered trees and plants in her terraced property in Cranberry to create a personal getaway literally in her own backyard.
“It’s like being on vacation every day,” she said. “My husband and I would spend a lot of time outside. … Every time we were in the yard, we felt like we were a million miles away.”
She especially loves all eight varieties of hydrangeas she’s planted in the space. She loves making flower bouquets and taking them everywhere she goes. “My garden, it’s a lot of natives and pollinator-friendly plants, but it’s also serving as a cutting garden.”
She even has a peaceful gardening philosophy to encourage other enthusiasts: “A garden is meant to be nurtured and loved, not perfect or judged.”
Jordan Oeler
Micro-Gardens
Jordan Oeler’s gardening memories go back, well, even further than he can remember. When Oeler was 18 months old, his father asked him what to plant in the garden that the family was starting to plan.
According to family legend, “I told him bacon and cheese,” Oeler recalled with a laugh.
As an adult with a backyard plot at his Shaler home, Oeler’s tastes have a more mature bend. After years of learning how to make his space work for him, he’s achieved a small organic garden that boasts a variety of plants, including 12 types of tomatoes, a personal favorite.
“Over the past couple of years, I’ve put some defined beds in place, I’ve done a lot of work using organic composing and minimally invasive methods with the soil to create that healthy biome,” he said.
Oeler sees sustainable landcare as an important aspect of gardening. “It’s not just important for the garden, it’s important for our property and, I genuinely believe, even broader. It’s important for our community and for our world.”
Joe Kostka
Abundant Edible Gardens
Joe Kostka has also been gardening “forever,” though after plenty of moving around through his career, his current setup in Natrona Heights is the first time he’s truly put down roots.
“It’s definitely a kind of meditative experience,” he said of his third-of-an-acre bursting with fruit trees, bushes and plants. “It teaches you something every day, something you never saw before.”
For example, maybe a brand new frog hopping about, or the pleasure of watching a zebra swallowtail butterfly on a pawpaw tree.
The pawpaws are his favorite, in fact. “Without a doubt. I’ve been growing those longer than any other plant,” he said. They even once had one of their pawpaw fruits win third place at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival.
“It’s an abundant edible garden,” he said, “Not just for us, but for the critters that come in.”
Debbie Stember
Gardens that Manage Rainwater
Debbie Stember would love to tell everyone to let their gardens go native. She had her greatest epiphany when she watched a flock of goldfinches munching a patch of thistle that she was berating herself for not clearing out. “The thing I thought of as a heinous weed … was somebody’s dinner buffet,” she said.
The pond in her Fox Chapel yard, which is fed by rainwater from the downspouts of the buildings on her property, is a constant source of wonder to her.
“There’s so much stuff that just showed up,” she said. “How did the frogs find it? The biodiversity that it supports is just stunning.”
She pointed out that planting native species is not only healthy for the biome, but it also helps to keep plants vibrant in less-than-ideal conditions. Even during the late-summer drought this year, “I have a ton of flowers, I have a ton of things blooming. It’s primarily the natives.”
Minette Vaccariello
Native Plantings and Wildlife
For Minette Vaccariello, the path to embracing native planting was adorned with butterflies.
“The big tipping point for me to move into more natives was my daughter. She was maybe about 4 and I must have had some milkweed in the yard, I don’t know if I planted it or if it just showed up one day. We had some monarch caterpillars … So I brought them in, we kind of watched them and she really got into it.”
Now she’s become a passionate supporter of the critters, even building a butterfly house on her corner lot property on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood. “I think that’s one of my favorite features in my garden because really, so many neighbors stop by.”
Her daughter is now 11 and still enjoys finding butterflies, spiders and other insects in the garden.
This has been a paid article submitted by our content partner.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.