It was a beautiful spring day -- and we went where anyone with any awareness would go: to the 80th Flower Mart. Herewith, a celebration of the way it looked, felt, smelled, tasted and sounded.
Sight
The first blossoms of the Flower Mart are the hardy annuals that appear at sunrise, white and orange, arranged in tidy borders at the farthest outposts of the Mount Vernon site like strangely shaped impatiens.
Barricades. White boards and the orange cones, diverting traffic around the Washington Monument, snaring early morning rush hour. Cars swarm at the base of the hill at Charles and Centre streets, confused as ants overwhelmed by Raid fumes. Must go up Charles Street. Must go up Charles Street. A blase police officer waves his arm in vague circles and an unhinged motorist attempts to go the wrong way on Centre Street.
Closer in, clustered at George Washington's feet, white tents begin to unfold, glossy as toadstools but less menacing. The tables are empty as freshly tilled beds; the occasional head of blue hair is like a violet on a woodland path.
It all gives the lie to the old saying that the thing generally raised on city land is taxes. For this day, at least, something has sprung to life from the rockiest of soils. Better still, it is not a burst water main.
There are grander things in Baltimore than the Flower Mart. Louder, feverish events in Camden Yards or Pimlico.
But nothing so thoroughly transforms a distinct place: Mount Vernon is rescued from din.
Discreet sounds emerge: the scrush, scrush of a cleaning man's final touch; water trickling from Henry Berge's bronze Sea Urchin; Christine Phillips chalking daisies on a sidewalk ("They are the most romantic flowers."); a sad saxophone.
Little girls, freed from school, chitter chatter. A mundane emergency: "We need a staple gun over here!"
Even memory has a voice. Victoria Davis, selling crab cakes at $4: "I remember my Dad bringing home an Oyster Fry: 13 oysters, potato salad, coleslaw, pickles. Two bucks!"
But that was in the early 1940s; the Flower Mart was in its 20s.
The loudest silences came, as usual, from the flowers the mart celebrates, and from LaFayette, upon his horse, gazing indifferently toward the harbor.
The most hopeful words heard: "I can still bop!" The most troublesome: "Sorry, we're temporarily out of crab cakes."
Richard O'Mara These are not the only reasons we flock to the Flower Mart: crab cakes, Frisbee-sized slabs of fried dough, intestinal-looking loops of Italian sausage, coddies (the crab cake's cheaper cousin), fresh-squeezed lemonade, pizza pretzels, chocolate strawberries, cream puffs and seven-layered fajitas.
This is the reason we go: the lemon stick.
What the hot dog is to a baseball game, what the corn dog is to a state fair, the lemon stick is to the Flower Mart.
Slice the tip off a lemon. Cut an "X" in the pulp. Shove a peppermint stick in the middle. Suck.
Here's what they don't tell you: Getting the lemon juice through the stick is about as easy as sucking a bowling ball through a milk straw.
But it's worth the effort. The acidic juice mingles with the sharp peppermint and you understand why people head first to the lemon stick stand.
This is what spring tastes like.
Ken Fuson There is a moment in one of Jerome Robbins' ballets when a dancer, as airborne and sky-seeking a species as blooms on this planet, suddenly crouches down and lightly touches the earth.
And so to the Flower Mart we go.
Wobbling on the cobblestone -- it's like being at sea, it takes awhile to get your legs -- the denizens of the concrete forest drift about this one-day Brigadoon of nature.
Geraniums with their cardboard-covered-in-velvet leaves, black-eyed Susans with their prickly ones. Dried flowers -- like faded memories of fresh ones -- vie for attention and actually prove more popular among some for their promise of everlasting bloom.
Most coveted, though, are the paper ones, as ruffly and bright as a flamenco's skirt. The moms of St. Francis of Assisi school accordion-pleat yards of soft yet crisp tissue paper, tie a bundle onto wooden stems, then unfurl each layer, turning pleats into petals and accordions into flowers.
A fortune teller takes your hand. Her own is leathery brown and cool.
She traces a furrow in the field of your palm, and promises long life.
Jean Marbella The first smell: frying onions tinged with grilled Italian sausage. Slightly bent, the Nose sniffs off in search of some exquisite floral scent.
"That's hard," says Woman's Civic League gardener Vardona Clarke, a 30-year veteran of the 80-year-old Flower Mart. "A lot of plants just don't smell that good."
The impatiens, carnations, marigolds and geraniums on sale simply are not big smellers. "We sell flowers for beauty, not aroma," says Hortense Hackett, of the W.C.L.'s Northwest Group.
But the Fleur de Lis stand produces Lilies of the Valley: "That's your best scent," says Christine Phillips, the proprietor. "Very subtle and seductive," says Carole Windsor, the manager.
The pungent aroma of burning pine drifts over from Celestial Dreams where Joel Wyman offers scented candles: "Trade Wind," "Sweet Home Memories" and "Escape." They're all splendidly odoriferous, extra strength and guaranteed to burn 100 hours.
To cleanse the nasal passage of any seductive celestial dreams, the Nose eats a slightly sour-smelling Covenant Guild coddie and then immerses itself in sweet nostalgia: the peppermint smell of a lemon stick.
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Carl Schoettler
