What wonders Maryland gardens hold. In our second annual garden contest, we discovered not only beautiful flowers and well-designed landscapes, but also bogs in shade gardens, fruit trees shaped by espalier, barren lots transformed into lush gardens and a balcony shaded by grape arbors and pine trees.
We received nearly 200 entries and visited 15 gardens from Bel Air to Gambrills. With the help of experts from the University of Maryland's Cooperative Extension Service and the Maryland Horticultural Society, we chose favorites in four categories: small, medium, large and edible, and an overall winner. These gardens exceeded our expectations and made us green with envy.
Becky Cody, Bel Air
Best Overall
Becky Cody's half-acre woodland garden seems as natural as can be. Wildflowers, ferns, Japanese maples and moss grow beneath a canopy of poplar trees. Paths meander alongside azaleas and past bogs sprouting delicate irises, ferns and foamflower. But all of this is according to design and is what Cody calls her "29-year work in progress."
Cody, a part-time operations manager with Chesapeake Corporate Advisers, dispels the notion that you can't grow anything in the shade. She has been a fan of woodland gardens since she was 6 years old and would wander in the woods near Victory Villa in Baltimore County where she grew up. "My dog and I would go out checking the wildflowers," she says.
When she married and moved to Edgewood, Cody had her first shade garden of azaleas, red maples, dogwoods and conifers. When her husband, Phil, suggested a move to Bel Air, she was reluctant to leave her garden. But he promised she could take it with her and much of it they did, digging up and transplanting 60 favorite trees and shrubs to start her new garden.
Their new yard had some trees and wildflowers. Cody drew up a plan of where everything else would go, and her husband helped dig and gather rocks. "This was a wonderful thing we could do together," she says.
Her husband died in 2004, but Cody continued to work on her shade garden. She came up with an idea for a new feature: "I had always wanted a place where I could have a bog garden," she says.
Her wooded lot didn't have one growing naturally and she wondered if she might be able to build one. She did some research and found that, indeed, she could. She dug a hole, lined it with plastic and filled it with rich well-drained soil in which she planted delicate irises, foamflower, ferns and lizard's tail.
