For 92 years they've called it Flower Mart, now Flowermart, but they might just as well call it Food Fest because everybody in Mount Vernon was eating Friday.
Including the plants.
As the Social Security Chorus sang old show tunes and 1970s television theme songs (Think Laverne and Shirley) on a stage nearby, the food booths' lines grew steadily longer for Italian sausage, quesadillas, gyros and crab cakes.
And just across the street, Michael and Pam Szesze's carnivorous plants were snacking on the insects tossed their way by the brisk noontime breeze.
Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, sundews and other hungry plants from their Carnivorous Plant Nursery in Derwood caught the attention of children and adults alike.
"I think it is fascinating," said Laura Jeffers of Pasadena, who paid $8 for a glass jar of tadpoles swimming among the bladderwort, a plant that eats the microorganisms generated by tadpole droppings. The tadpoles will eventually be toads in her garden.
"We have lots of pets," she said as she carefully carried away the family's newest additions.
Elsewhere, Flowermart traditions showed their sustaining strength: big hats, lemon sticks, face paint and Catholic school kids selling flowers.
Ascension School of Halethorpe won first place in the booth competition with the construction of a pond under its tent.
Even Immaculate Heart of Mary, second-place winner, was impressed. "The pond should have won," said an admiring Joanne McShalley of IHM in Towson. "We were just proud to be second."
Bobbie McKinney, dressed in the peach-and-black colors of this year's Flowermart, danced nearby with granddaughter Kaylah Hope, 5, whose face was brightly painted beneath her big hat and whose fingers were sticky with lemon juice and peppermint sticks.
"This is her first time, but I wait the whole year for Flowermart," McKinney said.
