First Lady of Pennsylvania Susan Corbett in front of the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg

  FROM TOP: First Lady Corbett speaking at ArtsQuest Center in Bethlehem; visiting The Nativity School of Harrisburg; hosting
the first “Arts in the Garden” event at the governor’s mansion
   

A Worthy Adversary
Every gubernatorial administration has its nemeses, and Susan Corbett, the First Lady of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is particularly vexed at her ever multiplying ones.

“The rabbits here are just devastating the herb garden,” says Corbett, who actually likes to be known as The First Gardener of the Commonwealth. “But it is a crisis we will get by,” she says with a chuckle, as she looks with approval over the rest of gardens that line the brick wall separating the inner and outer grounds of the governor’s mansion on the outer edges of downtown Harrisburg.

The previous governor, Ed Rendell, used the mansion more as an office or a ceremonial place, with his (now estranged) wife, Midge, being a judge and thus more tied to Philadelphia; Rendell repaired to his East Falls home as often as possible. The Corbetts, however, have decided to pretty much hunker down in the state capital for the governor’s time in office, and Susan is mad about the gardens she gets to tend in the meantime— uncharacteristically so for a first lady, it would seem. “I came out one day in my grubby gardening clothes and the grounds staff was perplexed,” says the tall, always smiling First Gardener. “I had figured a lot of the first ladies loved to garden; they said [Michele] Ridge would tell them what she wanted done, but that was it.”

For a woman who makes the Philadelphia International Flower Show a must every year and who tends the acre on which the Corbett family home lies—a pre-Civil War house in which the governor grew up, eight miles from downtown Pittsburgh—this is heresy. She has invited master gardeners from the Harrisburg area to donate their best plantings to the cutting garden she has created, and she carefully tends the vegetable and the rabbit-infested herb gardens. With honeybees becoming more threatened, she has brought in a couple of hives. “But this is the governor’s mansion, so we made it a bit fancier—the houses the hives are in have copper roofs,” she says, again with her signature laugh.

Chairing for the Arts
In case it isn’t painfully obvious at this point, Corbett has no intention of sitting still during her Harrisburg sojourn. For the past 15 years or so, ever since she left her role as a stay-at-home mom when her children were in high school, she has worked in the nonprofit arts, culture and historical heritage field—first in Pittsburgh and then in Gettysburg, when her husband was Attorney General during the late 2000s. She is the chair of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which oversees the parceling out of the eight million hard-fought dollars won in the budget battle between her husband and the state legislature. The House’s original budget cut the Council’s funding by 70 percent, but the First Lady got arts advocates around the state to plead with legislators to keep the budget near 2010 levels.

“We wanted to make sure our legislators understood that this is not something elitist,” says Corbett. “This is something that impacts young people—arts in education—and is a huge economic driver for the state. It is an important part of keeping our cities vibrant. So I am really pleased that the legislature realized that it is a really small investment with a really big payout.”