On a recent Sunday, I attended the 100th birthday celebration of a house on Elmwood Road in Roland Park. Although I’d been to the house before, I had not been there during the daytime since childhood.
Dreaming of Spring
On a cold February morning, the temperature says winter, but the light says spring. The brightness brings daydreams; in my mind’s eye I see new blooms.
Fall Color in the Garden
Gardens take on a special look in fall. With leaves falling and plants turning brown, the landscape looks more relaxed.
Shorter days and the end of the blooming season make each flower more appreciated: the final roses, the ubiquitous chrysanthemums, a wild-card zinnia, a dahlia.
Container Envy
I have container envy. My garden has too many beds and too many weeds right now. Every August I wish I had only containers to tend.
Christmas in July
I have taken to eating every meal I can out in our garden. This morning the chairs and benches were too wet, so I sat on a dry brick step at the top of a covered porch. By lunchtime everything was dry, so I sat in a wooden chair to eat and look around.
With all of the rain this year the oakleaf hydrangeas, planted last year, have taken off.
How Does Your Garden Show: Sculpturesque
At this year’s Celebration of Art benefit for the Cylburn Arboretum Association, sculpture was shown for the first time. Although every one of their floral arrangements at past Cylburn events has been eye-popping, this year Nolley & Fitzpatrick Event Design created a sculptural masterpiece.
Spring Roars in Like A Lion with Baltimore Blossoms
Two 80-degree days last week brought spring roaring in like a lion with. So much popped out: forsythia,
tulips, grape hyacinths,
flower magazine Editor Comes to Baltimore
Last week Margot Shaw, founding editor of flower magazine, was the 25th anniversary lecturer during Art Blooms at the Walters Art Museum. She spoke about a year in the life of flower, not a plant, but her magazine. A fellow Hollins graduate, I felt lucky to be included in a dinner with her.
Spring, at Last!
Hello, spring! Yes, it’s hard to believe, but it is spring at last. Never mind the snows. Never mind the cool temps. The blooms that opened the first week of spring are all the proof I need that spring is here.
Forget mounds of snow at the edge of parking lots, salt encrusted patches of streets, frost and snow-bitten brown leaves on evergreens: ivy, sweet box, holly, boxwood and Nandina. Plants are blooming. Repeat: plants ARE blooming.
They started in the form of tiny white snowdrops pushing up from the snow then bloomed after the melt, small ones by our front steps and giant ones up the street.
Day by day the color increases. Naturalized crocuses across the lawn of an open lot seem magical, like a spring version of the poppy fields in Oz.
Cool temperatures hold most of the flowers closed, so they stand like battalions of miniature soldiers beating back winter.
Down the street a neighbor planted a witch hazel when she moved in 20 years ago.
Now the size of an ornamental tree, its neon yellow blooms pulsate “Spring!”
Deep purple and yellow crocuses at other neighbors’ remind us that Easter is just weeks away.
Their small witch hazel bush is a focal point of the early back garden. Maroon hellebores buds under woody branches of hydrangeas promise the mop heads too will eventually appear.
Likewise, daffodil foliage and buds pushing through brown leaves show that yellow trumpets will soon follow.
Most surprising to me, in this winter-scorched landscape, is deep blue. It jumped out first on vinca vines down a bank.
The next day royal blue chionodoxa blooms appeared nearby.
Equally amazing was an impression of a deer hoof in the surrounding earth, only a block from Cold Spring Lane.
As exciting as every spring is, spring 2014 already feels like a daily miracle.
The Elements of Period Gardens
This is a big week at Cylburn Arboretum. Located off of Northern Parkway, this green oasis is increasingly enjoyed by both city and county residents. In recent years, the Cylburn Arboretum Association has connected nature with art through exhibitions in the Vollmer Center, programs for adults and children and an artist-in-residence program.
Cylburn’s first artist-in-residence, Patricia Bennett opens her exhibit of paintings done during her past year there. Well-known as an event painter, Bennett has also produced an impressive series of Impressionistic paintings of the gardens. An opening reception takes place Friday, November 1 at 5:30 p.m. The show continues through the weekend, then November 5-7.
A new effort begins Sunday, November 3 at 2 p.m. with the Arboretum’s first book talk and signing. In cooperation with the Ivy Bookshop and Timber Press, author Laura Burchfield will speak and show excerpts from her newly released book American Home Landscapes, A Design Guide to Creating Period Garden Styles.
I’ve been working to replant the gardens around the 1922 Roland Park house where I grew up and live. Not until I saw the Timber Press book did I realize what a period garden we still have. Essential elements of American, Colonial Revival gardens from 1900-1930 include: symmetry, balance and a central axis, geometric beds, a picket fence, old-fashioned flowers.
In Roland Park, fences were originally permitted only in limited form, never in the front yard, because of the Olmsted design principal of low hedges instead of fences. At our house, however, the second owner was granted an exception to the architectural restrictions, because he thought Cold Spring Lane was too busy. If only he could see it now. Boxwoods were used for the front border, but along the sides and back, he installed brick pillars with sections of square, white spindles in between.
No flower garden was in front or along the sides, just more boxwoods and a long lilac border on the east side and privet hedge on the west.
