Gardener's Paradise Built for Growing Families

Karen Cepko remembers the day the cows invaded.

"One afternoon I had three cows in my back yard, eating my grass," Cepko said. They had wandered in from the farm next door through a hole in the fence.

That was shortly after Cepko had moved to Howard County's Holiday Hills subdivision in 1962. Back then, a dirt road ran in front of her ranch-style house, the planned city of Columbia was but a gleam in developer James Rouse's eye and each morning she awoke to the crowing of a rooster.

Buying a house on a one-acre lot was a compromise: Cepko had hoped for three acres in a county that was then mostly farmland.

Now her one-acre lot is large compared with much of what's available along the Route 29 corridor, her road is paved and Columbia almost touches her subdivision. However, her neighborhood, off the only traffic light on the Howard County section of Route 29, remains largely secluded. She and her neighbors say they like it that way.

The large lots and rural feel drew Nancy and Doug Perkins to Holiday Hills 20 years ago from a house with a tiny yard in downtown Columbia.

"I wanted the acreage," Nancy Perkins said. She had started her home search in Bethesda and Chevy Chase, only to discover that even in the late 1980s, houses on acre lots there were too expensive.

Holiday Hills offered affordability and good schools as well as land, she said.

Nancy Perkins looked at a soil map before she and her husband made an offer on a house, she said, and found that the neighborhood sits on some of the most fertile soil in the county. The family bought a 1962 three-bedroom brick split foyer on a little more than an acre.

Perkins, who calls gardening her therapy, has turned her large, level back yard into a gardener's paradise, growing vegetables, herbs, blueberries, black-eyed susans, clematis, false indigo, irises and fruit trees.

Since Perkins arrived, county water and sewer lines have followed, opening the area to more development. Today, two-story frame Colonials built in the late 1980s and 1990s on smaller lots intermix with the brick ranchers, split levels and split foyers of an earlier era. The distinct housing styles bring an eclectic look to the area.

Tally Williams lives on a newer street of Colonial-style houses with her husband, Joe, and 15-month-old son, Jacob. The couple, who moved in three years ago, were attracted by the schools, the convenience of the location halfway between Baltimore and Washington and the well-tended homes.