There are certain holidays and the one you never want to miss is Mother’s Day, which is always observed on the second Sunday in May.
So, order those flowers, make dinner reservations, select a piece of jewelry and plan to wear a white carnation, which is the official Mother’s Day flower.
A sign on a York Road liquor store last year said it all: “Don’t forget Mom on Mother’s Day. After all, you’re the reason she drinks!”
And while you’re at it, why not plan a visit to Baltimore’s Mothers Garden which since 1926, has been remembering mothers.
The five-acre greensward is located in Clifton Park, at the intersection of Harford Road and Erdman Avenue, tucked away at a corner of the park’s golf course.
The holiday traces its roots to 1868, when Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, of Grafton, W. Va., established a Mother’s Friendship Day, to help families heal who had been physically and emotionally separated by the Civil War.
In Grafton, she was an active communicant of St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where she also taught Sunday school.
In 1876, she ended one of her lessons with this prayer: “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother’s day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.”
Before national recognition arrived, Jarvis died in 1905, and her work was exuberantly taken up by her daughter, Anna Jarvis, who organized the first Mother’s Day service at St. Andrew’s in 1907.
Jarvis later moved to Philadelphia where she became acquainted with John Wanamaker, the department store impresario, who established the fabled store that bears his name.
The first “official” Mother’s Day service, as we know it, was held May 10, 1908 at St. Andrew’s, and in the afternoon, and according to the “Encyclopedia of Motherhood,” an estimated 15,000 gathered that afternoon in the Wanamaker Auditorium in the store to honor mom.
Its popularity spread to New York City the next year, and in 1910, the state of West Virginia made it an official holiday.
Its popularity swept the nation, and in 1913, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution that required all federal officials — including the president — to wear carnations on Mother’s Day.
The Congress made the second Sunday in May official as Mother’ Day when it approved a law doing so on May 8, 1914.
On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation establishing the first national Mother’s Day, and twelve years later, Baltimore unveiled its own tribute to mom, when William I. Norris, president of the city park board, conceived the idea of the Mothers Garden on the site of a former sand and gravel quarry.
Visitors will be impressed with the breath-taking view of the skyline of the city and the spires of City College and Notre Dame University of Maryland rising in the distance.
Pathways lead to a stone pavilion on a slight rise of land that keeps watch over beds of larkspur, mignonette, dahlias and other plants.
A pergola and a quaint stone Japanese bridge that spans a lily pond offer venues of quiet contemplation.
Its original planting required more than 15,000 plants.
“It will be a beautiful, secluded spot for young mothers and for aged mothers who wish to spend their quiet hours over needles in meditation,” Norris said at the time.
“The garden formerly was an old quarry. Now it’s a profusion of bloom,” reported The Evening Sun in 1926.
“In addition to a great variety of old-fashioned flowers, there is a promise of others, for the banks of the pool are planted with iris and rambling roses will be trained over the pergola and the slope of the garden. The flagstone path is lighted with quaint lanterns hanging from rustic poles,” the newspaper reported.
It was dedicated August 27, 1928, before a crowd of 6,000.
“Mothers and flowers to man are given,” reads the inscription on the marker that was added in 1928, “to bridge the span twixt earth and heaven.”
By the 1980s, time and tide had caught up with the garden that had become a scene of neglect, with litter, broken benches and weed-ridden gardens obscuring its former beauty and possibilities.
It had become an eyesore and caught the attention of Baltimore’s impetuous and “Do-it-now” mayor, William Donald Schaefer.
With assistance from the Board of Recreation and Parks, the Mayfield Improvement Association and the Baltimore Recreation and Parks Foundation, its restoration was undertaken and completed.
On May 13, 1984, Schaefer unveiled a plaque to the memory of Tululu I. Schaefer, his mother, and “all the mothers of Baltimore.”
“She was a good Christian woman,” he told The Baltimore Sun at the time.
Over the years, neglect again befell the garden, and it was a Mayfield neighbor, Jim Bartlett, who rode to its rescue when he and his wife, Courtney, established Friends of Mothers Garden, a nonprofit, that marshalled volunteers while raising money for the gardens restoration and care.
“I remember seeing pictures of it from the 1920s and it is a garden that has been through many cycles. It is a hidden gem and a wonderful oasis in Northeast Baltimore,” said Bartlett, 56, an environmental consultant, who also works in commercial real estate.
“It has seen inattention and renaissance, so I decided to rally the neighbors,” said Bartlett, who moved to Chattanooga in 2021.
“People came out to plant flowers and trees, fix stones and pathways,” he said. “Elementary and junior high school students joined them. It really became a focus of the community,” Bartlett said.
Today, its work is overseen by Civic Works whose headquarters are in Clifton Park on St. Lo Drive.
Bartlett grew whimsical speaking about the garden.
“When I moved away from Baltimore, the garden was one of the things I miss the most,” he said.
