A garden needs constant tending, even those small enough to fit into the yard of a Baltimore rowhouse.
That dictum motivates those who toil in the soil of the Cylburn Arboretum, and who this year have recently reclaimed a collection of small gardens created decades ago to showcase the potential of Baltimore homes but which had succumbed to neglect and inattention.
Newly reimagined and rebuilt this year at Cylburn are the City Demonstration Gardens. The small but inspiring spaces were created through a collaborative effort harnessing the vision and energy of a next generation of gardeners, designers, residents and non-profit leaders.
Visitors to Cylburn, on Greenspring Avenue in North Baltimre, can head near the greenhouses, and, between the nature education center and the original mansion dating to the 1880s, find five plots that are ready for soaking up inspiration and imagining the potential of your own backyard.
With hardy native plants, benches and paving blocks made of reclaimed wood, designers and volunteers have created spaces that ready for any Baltimore resident to duplicate behind their rowhouse.
While the built environment in Baltimore gets a lot of attention (think of the unfolding debate over the future of the festival Harborplace pavillions), the city’s 4,000 acres of open space and parks remain something of a hidden secret, from Leakin Park to Druid Hill Park and beyond. Cylburn has a connection to many of them. It’s the place where the orchids that bloom in the Rawlings Conservatory at Druid Hill are grown, and where small-scale trees that befit a dense urban environment are nurtured.
The Cylburn mansion (designed by the same architect behind Baltimore City Hall) and 200-acre estate was purchased by the City of Baltimore in the early days of World War II, and have evolved in the years since. It officially became an arboretum in the 1980s, and many of its features were designed by Gerard Moudry, the first horticulturalist of Baltimore City.
Moudry inspired the first version of what became known as the City Backyard Gardens, opened in the 1980s to acclaim. But plants grow, or get eaten by deer. Garden features succumb to the elements. A Baltimore Sun article from 1984 quoted one landscaper of a plot describing how the dozens of trees and shrubs he installed would requiring replanting in about 20 years. That didn’t happen, and the city gardens fell victim to city parks budget pressures and shifting priorites.
But by 2013, when Brent “Fig” Figlestahler took a position as an intern at Cylburn, one of his first assignments was to tear down some of the decrepit wooden fencing that was separating the gardens.
“A lot of the infrastructure in place had kind of worn out,” said Figlestahler, who goes by Fig. But he also realized that much had changed in the decades since the demonstration was erected.
“A lot changes horticulturally over time,” Fig said. “We know about invasive plants. We know about the value of planting native. We know about stormwater and its effects on the Chesapeake Bay.”
Those ideas became part of the inspiration for the redesign.
Figlestahler became the Cylburn Aboretum Friends head gardener in 2019, and a couple of years later, in June 2022, he was lunching with friend and colleague Kevin Gaughan. Gaughan and Figlestahler had worked together at Campion Hruby Landscape Architects, and now Gaughan was owner of FORM Garden Design.
Their lunch brainstorm: Enlist individual designers to turn each plot into a mini exhibit, allowing them to reshape the spaces using best practices and unique ideas. We can “leverage our relationships” among small community of green-oriented designers, Gaughan recalls thinking, and reclaim the space that Fig had been working on nearly a decade earlier.
And that’s exactly what happened, over a period of several years. Gaughan agreed that his firm would take on one of the lots. They are the driving force behind what is now called Garden 4: Senses + Stillness. Other partners on that plot include Hilles and Rosalie Whedbee (as a garden club).
The garden includes a curved gravel path with large pieces of tree trunk reclaimed from Camp Small (the facility where Baltimore’s fallen trees go to be reused) as pavers. A big bowl serves as a fountain, with water flowing
“We wanted a sense of movement,” Gaughan said.
What is now Garden 2 is named the Naomi Camper Memorial Garden, in honor of the founding president of Baltimore’s For-Win-Ash Garden Club, the first African American garden club to join the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. The name comes from the three Northwest Baltimore communities from which its originating members were drawn: Forest Park, Windsor Hills and Ashburton.
“Our main goal was to give this small rowhome-style demonstration garden a makeover while honoring and holding onto the character of Naomi Camper,” said Caleb Austin, a designer from the Groundsmith Collective firm, in an email to Baltimore Fishbowl. “We did so by creating distinct garden ‘rooms,’ framing views into the garden, and using simple geometry that had a certain elegance the team and garden club appreciated.”
Austin called working with the For-Win-Ash garden club “extremely rewarding.”
“Hearing about the club’s history, their founding president for which the garden is named, their legacy of beautification and community leadership, and what Naomi Camper’s garden means to them reminded us that a garden can hold a lot more than plants,” he said. “And as a young African American designer, to be able to work with and design for the first African-American garden club admitted to the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland was truly special and a significant milestone in my professional career.”
The renovated demonstration gardens required intensive collaboration and took months longer than planned. While a lot of the work and materials were donated – with Baltimore’s Second Chance supplying many materials – a budget of $30,000 paid primarily for hardscaping materials and other elements. It was ready for viewing in May 2026, coinciding with Market Day, a major fundraising event for the arboretum.
The other plots include: Garden 1: The Garth, designed by Apiary Studio of Philadelphia and sponsored by The Amateur Gardeners Club; Garden 3: The Learning Pad, designed by Cylburn Arboretum Friends; and Garden 5: The Nestled Native Garden, designed by Phaire Gardens and sponsored by the Halten Garden Club.
Since the gardens have been completed, feedback is positive. “Conceptually it worked out great,” said Gaughan, of FORM. “I’ve had several people come up and tell me they saw it and it inspired them.”
Austin said his proved has “received praise for the stonework in selecting reclaimed bricks as a way to save on costs but not at the expense of beauty,” and that visitors love details like the metal arbor that was welded on site by staff at Cylburn.
“Its shown them how intentionally and artfully dividing a space can make it feel larger,” Austin said. “Most importantly, members of the For-Win-Ash garden club themself have congratulated our team and thanked us for the years spent on beautifying a space so dear to their hearts.”
The demonstration project is helping fulfills the educational mission of the arboretum space, said Brooke Fitz, executive director of Clyburn Arboretum Friends, the non-profit that operates there. Since the earlies days of city ownership, “the idea has always been that Cylburn should be a teaching space,” Fritz said.
“It’s not just us headquartered there as the Friends group,” she said. “There’s also the Horticultural Society of Maryland, Federated Garden Clubs, Baltimore Bird Club and the Baltimore City Horticulture Department. The idea was always that it would be this collection of organizations and people who are all trying to educate.”
The renovated gardens, she said, can do just that. But gardens change over time, and the tending never ceases. What visitors see today will be different in months and years.
Landscaping and gardening are “kind of the slowest of the performance arts,” says Fig, paraphrasing Mac Griswold, an acclaimed landscape historian. “Gardens are experienced differently by everyone…walk through the space, come back throughout the seasons.
While the gardens look new now, “come next year, hopefully they’re more full,” Fig said. “We will see what what works and what doesn’t.”
And that tending means everything.
