Article: Roots Intertwined; Lilies-of-the-Valley Grown in the Soil of a Family's Past

The arbiters of taste in the garden measure a plant's worth by such things as its flower color or growth habit.

These are important considerations, but not the only ones. Sometimes, a plant that looks quite ordinary to one person is filled with priceless sentimental associations to another. For brothers Steven and Peter Schenk, the lilies-of-the-valley in their Northern Virginia gardens have the power to transport them back to the 18th century, to the fabled Black Forest of Germany where their ancestors lived.

They trace their family story to 1740, when the Schenk brothers' great-grandmother's great-grandmother got married, and she and her husband built a wooden house in a village on the ...

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