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by Patricia LePage, March 4, 2001 Nothing teaches a sense of place better than the experience of digging and planting in a certain type of soil, under a certain sun, surrounded by the buildings of your own and neighboring properties. As all gardeners know, one of the inescapable principles of gardening is that you have to garden where you are. I learned what I know about gardening in Baltimore, during our thirty years in a turn-of-the-century row house. Charles Village, where we live, is a city neighborhood whose days of glory are long past but whose residents are still stubbornly trying to hold on to a sense of community. It is interesting that so many of us are gardeners. Our limitations are numerous - space, pollution, poor soil, the heat and humidity of Baltimore summers and a southern sun shining on pavement and brick buildings.
We begin using the yard in April when our pink dogwood blooms. The pansies and daffodils are still blooming and in a good year, the viburnum by the gate still has a few of its scented blooms. The sweet woodruff , columbine and bleeding heart follow and by the time the petals of the dogwood begin to fall, the blossoms of the pink Clematis Montana are covering the fence and the roses are coming into bloom. Later in the summer we have shade-loving astilbes, morning glories and scented white moon flowers as well as a bed of heavily scented Asian Lilies. We go on vacation in August and coming home we are always welcomed by the warm, evocative scent and frothy white blooms of the Autumn-flowering Clematis. By now the morning glories have climbed up to the second-floor porch where their bright blue flowers look like a giant Peacock's tail.
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A Gardener's Notes
As a city gardener I have discovered ways to deal with almost all of these problems. Now I see limited space as an advantage. The garden becomes an extension of the house, a summer dining room, a place to entertain guests, a shady place to sit and read on a hot afternoon, a quiet getaway. Our children discovered nature in our little back garden which became for them a microcosm of the natural world. The more we planted, the more we attracted birds, butterflies, insects, and even an occasional squirrel. We've had humming birds and resident preying mantises. We have seen insects here that we have never seen anywhere else; from tiny, fragile green creatures that glide down out of the dogwood tree to the incredible hairy black spiders that I saw during only one summer wrapped in their silvery webs early in the morning. No one believes us when we tell them about the yellow jackets we feed with tiny bites of chicken on summer nights! Birds migrate through and in the Fall, we occasionally see monarch butterflies on their way South.
I have learned much over the years about how to lighten and enrich heavy, clay soil and to improve drainage. Even now I recycle all of the potting soil in my various pots and window boxes back into the garden. I compost leaves from friends' suburban gardens and put coffee grounds around my rose bushes. I've experimented with saving and crushing egg shells to put under lilacs and other plants that prefer alkaline soil. This I found was safer than adding lime in such a small garden where lilacs and azaleas grow in close proximity. I always till under some of the Fall plant debris to improve soil texture and fertility. My worst experience, however, was when I hauled some lovely, humusy soil back from a nearby woods only to learn toward the end of the summer that I had also imported some very healthy poison ivy.
The shade caused by tall security fences and the row houses themselves I now welcome as a boon during our torrid summers. Because I have to garden in the shade I have come to prefer the delicate colors of shade loving plants and the peaceful green of ivy and ferns. I have experimented with many types of shade-loving annuals including the little blue-purple torenia, pink and white nicotiana, the lovely blue browalia and of course begonias (except the tuberous varieties which don't like our hot, humid summers), coleus and the whole rainbow palate of impatiens. In this climate, I love the dappled shade of our back yard and its nuances of color and light.
It has taken many years to turn me into a Baltimore gardener, skilled in the ways of city gardening and attuned to its possibilities. However if gardening teaches a sense of place it also encourages a certain desire for rootedness which is not always in keeping with our transient American way of life. For us, change symbolizes opportunity and new beginnings. We are taught to "go with the flow." Now I am looking for some kind of gardening wisdom to guide me through the challenge of a move from our Baltimore home of thirty years to a contemporary house in rural Rhode island, surrounded by 4.5 wooded acres. It occurs to me that whether room-sized or park-sized, gardens are all created according to the same principles. You have to garden where you are and in so doing, you learn to know something about the land and climate of your region and in time you become part of it. Moreover, as my gardening experience in Baltimore has taught me, gardens and gardening wisdom are meant to be shared. So now I am beginning to look forward to my new experience and to see the garden as an opportunity to try something new, to make some friends and maybe even to rediscover my New England roots.