Wordless Wednesday - Last Year's Cherry Blossoms

(Yes, today I wrote about the upcoming festival.)

Daffodils and a Garden Plan‏

I have not finished planning my garden this year. I know, I know, everyone else has done this already. But, there were a few things I was thinking over and waiting out. I have to reconfigure things a bit because of a new shady area. But, that is not bad because the now shady spot was once a scorchingly sunny area where my plants often dried out. This year, I'm going to have bright shade tolerant flowers in that area, like impatiens. I decided to grow mostly flowers and herbs. Last year my vegetables did not produce the way I'd like them to and I think I'm going to give that a rest for this year and only grow pleasurable things. I'm going to get seeds for tall heirloom flowers and I will also wind morning glories around my bean poles. With my square foot vegetable bed, I might reconfigure it in the a more traditional herb garden design, with some kind of round shapes.

Just after I did a lame "What's blooming in Baltimore?" post for March, flowers are suddenly out everywhere. I've seen flowering trees, iris, and am starting to see zillions of daffodils. The tulip poplars look like they are emerging. These daffodils are behind the Rotunda, up against one of those little buildings back there.

That Elusive Delmarva Fox Squirrel

I’m sure I’m going to tell you lots of squirrel stories as I write this blog. In my neighborhood we are blessed/cursed with the common gray squirrel, which is cute but can be destructive. I am more enamored with the Delmarva fox squirrel, which my friend and I have had brushes with on the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

The first time I went there I read about this squirrel in the visitor’s center. Oh, they are shy, retiring, hard to spot and endangered. People we knew had been coming to Chincoteague for years never saw one. Well, yes, we saw one, on that very trip. As we made one last trip through the wildlife loop before driving back to Baltimore, there he was! The elusive Delmarva Fox squirrel was sitting on the side of the road and sunning himself. Well, since we were leaving the cameras were packed and by the time we finished our fumbling he was gone.

This squirrel, though shy and retiring, likes to sit by the road and taunt passers by. We saw them on subsequent trips, but they always ran just out of camera range. In fact, most of my pictures of them show them streaking away. But, one day last fall this squirrel decided to pose for me, and in range of my zoom lens.

So, that is what prompted me to write “Types of squirrels found in Maryland”. I was just curious about the Delmarva Fox Squirrel in particular. It was also interesting to see that we have gray, red and flying squirrels in Maryland as well.

Next, I’m going to write an article about deterring them as pests, which is less romantic but more practical.

Peeking over a wall in Annapolis

I was in Annapolis on St. Patrick’s Day and peeked over the wall of the Paca house to see how the gardens fared. It mostly looks as lovely as ever, but in the second photo you can see how their evergreens were damaged by the storm. I also saw lots of damage to the shrubbery in front of the Hammond-Harwood house.

The Paca house is dear to my heart and I assure you all I do not always look for free. I’m sure I will be there again this summer, once the garden season is in full bloom.

Emerging Flowers

At least once a month I like to wander around Baltimore city, particularly downtown, and keep tabs on all of the local greenery. At this time of the year things are beginning to emerge with the promise of a bloom. Here, it looks like tulips are going to grow among these pansies, though I can’t be sure. The leaf shape sure looks like it, though. This is up near the top of that big concrete fountain that is at one end of McKeldin Square. You can see part of the fountain structure in the upper right and the Gallery on the upper left.

Visiting Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia

This post isn’t about Baltimore, but I wanted to write about Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. I visited there recently and I just liked it. We cut through the park to get to a bookstore and the first thing I saw was some guerrilla knitting on a tree. I was tickled, as I usually am when I find knitting on trees. But, I am not familiar with the Charlottesville knitting scene so I didn’t turn up any information about that. Instead I will write about this interesting statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler, which is also in the park.

In 1917, a prominent local citizen, Paul Goodloe McIntire, bought this property. He had a house removed from the lot and tuned it into a formally landscaped park. Eventually gave it to the city of Charlottesville, intending it as a memorial to his parents and also as a place for an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler. For McIntire, getting this statue in place was a long and worrisome adventure. He commissioned Henry Shrady, who at the time was engrossed in his most famous work, an elaborate equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant.

Between finishing that project and his poor health, Shrady made little progress on the Lee statue over the next few years. On his deathbed in 1922, Shrady begged his doctors to keep the cloths covering his wet clay model wet. They didn’t know what he was talking about and so the model was ruined when the canvas dried and stuck to the fine details of the sculpture. Another artist, Leo Lentelli, worked diligently to research the details and to finish the sculpture. The Roman Bronze Works finally cast it in New York during the winter of 1924. On May 3rd, 1924, it was unveiled as Lee’s great granddaughter (aged 3) Mary Walker Lee pulled away a Confederate flag.


Resources

A Guide to the History and Gardens of Lee Park

Lee Park

Charlottesville and Waynesboro, Virginia

I’m back from a relaxing trip to Charlottesville, Virginia where my friend and I stayed with our accommodating friend, Joe H. On Friday we explored downtown Charlottesville and poked around the bookstores down there. I was amused to discover this tree with a bit of guerrilla knitting on it. In my old blog I once did a post on guerrilla knitting and have since tried to hunt up pieces of urban knitting in Baltimore. But, since that sort of thing comes and goes I am not always successful. So, I was happy to find this in a little park near the library, not far from an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee. From maps I guess that this would be near the corner of 1st and Market.

I love Charlottesville, or “T.J.’s town”, as out host sometimes calls it. It has a pleasant country charm but it also has a lot of cultural things that I am used to up here in Baltimore: movies, bookstores and museums. They even have some sort of shopping promenade near this park, with lots of cool little shops and theaters. I wish the area around our harbor here in Baltimore was like that instead of full of chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory.

On Saturday we tooled around Waynesboro, which is just over the mountain from Charlottesville. It has a great Salvation Army, Chinese buffet, music store, and an excellent little museum operated by the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation. This museum is free and packed with things related to Waynesboro history, from the Civil War, to local industry, to their movie theaters and drug stores. If you like 19th century history there is a lot to see in this little old bank building.

After that, we wanted to go up on the Blue Ridge mountains and travel sight-see along Skyline Drive but it was closed. Our host speculated that it was due to storm damage, not only from the February snow, but also from the recent wind and rainstorms that were ending as we arrived. There seemed to be a lot of storm damage on trees down there, even more so that up here and we got it pretty bad. Still, the rain cleared out by afternoon and so our host took us to a place where we could get a few scenic photos.

Searching for snowdrops

(This was the first entry in the old A Baltimore Gardener blog.)

This morning I impulsively started this blog because I felt the need to journal not only about my personal gardening experiences, but about my garden writing. I write a column for Examiner and I try to stick by the “no first person” rule because I feel that it makes me look more professional. However, I do have a lot of photography/writing adventures and sometimes travel to gardens outside of the city. This morning I was inspired yet again by May Dreams Gardens, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

For example, I’ve been trying to find snowdrops for a month. My photos from last year are dated early February and I know that I found them out at Lake Roland, along that path that is up the hill, beyond the pumping station. But, searches at that time this year yielded nothing and then the big snows came. On Monday a friend and I walked back there for the first time since before the February storms. There is still plenty of snow, muck, and ice out there so it took forever to walk a short way, but I eventually found the snowdrops. I wanted to do a “What’s blooming in Baltimore?” article for March but not much is out and I wanted my snowdrops.

Since I found these, snowdrops seem to be everywhere. When I was running yesterday morning I found some naturalized along Evan's Chapel Road. On my way to work I found another small grouping near the small playground near the old Hampden police station.

Ironically I just found a daffodil in my own garden, but that story will be in my next post.