Garden

Even if you're not yet ready to retire, San Miguel de Allende is perfect for a vacation or long weekend getaway. Getting there United and American airlines offer connecting flights (via Texas) to San Miguel's two closest airports, Leon/Guanajuato (BJX), 90 minutes away, and Queretaro (QRO), one hour away. Round-trip airfares start around $600. Multiple airlines offer flights to Mexico City, which is three hours from San Miguel. When to go January may be the sole inclement month to travel, and even then it's nothing compared to a typical Baltimore winter.

The nation's debt to men and women who serve in uniform can never be fully repaid. But Jane Kramer believes every little bit helps. She said that's why the Howard County Garden Club undertook the project to install a Blue Star Memorial marker, honoring present and former armed forces members, in the heart of Ellicott City. At the Howard County Welcome Center at 8267 Main St. in Ellicott City, a formal dedication was held Friday at 10 a.m., with live music, military ceremonies, presentations and comments from local elected officials.

Always, there were those lovely old country estates and gracious manor taverns with roaring fireplaces, but in the old days fine dining was associated with the city. Not so anymore. Now, there are more compelling reasons than ever for diners to cross county lines for a good meal. The 50 best county restaurants in Howard County, Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County is a mix of the old and the new, destinations for special occasions and joints for Monday night suppers, the chef-driven and crowd-pleasing.

How should I mulch a vegetable garden? Do I need to mulch all of it? Anywhere you don't want weeds will require mulch. Mulch helps retain moisture and moderate soil temperatures, but weed suppression is the No. 1 goal because weeds steal water, nutrients and sunlight from vegetables. Organic mulches of mowed leaves or straw with three to four layers of newspaper underneath make an impenetrable barrier to weeds while allowing rain to soak through. These will last the growing season and decompose over the winter, feeding the soil.

White-tailed deer are strictly plant eaters. A Pennsylvania Game Commission study of the stomachs of road-killed deer found 98 plant species, including trees, shrubs, leafy plants and garden vegetables. And rhododendrons. If you have rhododendrons in your garden, and deer in the neighborhood, you probably also have a 5-foot browse line, with green leaves above and brown branches below. Deer love rhododendrons, especially in winter. So how did three busloads of rhododendron fanciers attending the American Rhododendron Society's recent national convention in King of Prussia, Pa., find anything at all to look at during their tour of several gardens belonging to members of the society's Lehigh Valley, Pa., chapter?

Gardeners are forever looking for something to wrap a flower bed around. There has to be a bed along the front of the porch, and others might be carved out around a garden shed, a birdbath or the trunks of shade trees. For many people, there's another opportunity right out by the curb: the mailbox. A garden bed around a mailbox gives gardeners a chance to put their horticultural stamp where it's sure to show. In the midst of handsome shrubs, interesting ornamental grasses or hard-working annual and perennial flowers, a standard-issue mailbox on a post becomes a piece of functional art. When there's a flower bed to visit, the trip out to the mailbox is much more interesting, even if the postman brings nothing but bills.

Las Posas is a Mexican sculpture garden created between 1954 and 1984 by eccentric British collector, poet and architect Edward James. The garden is an 80-acre site filled with surrealistic concrete sculptures of architectural elements including stairs, bridges, archways and columns. Photographer Joan Rosenstein has used the garden as a setting for her photographs of the female form. The exhibit, "The Surreal World of Las Posas," at Montgomery College combines Rosenstein's black and white photographs of women in the garden with her color photographs of the garden.

T he number of home gardeners jumped by almost 40 percent last season, but nearly half of them won't be back this year. Most probably found vegetable gardening too much work. Or, because it was a pretty poor gardening season, they didn't have much success. So, in a series of columns, I'm trying to get rookie vegetable gardeners off to a solid start. Last week, we talked about siting the garden, and my advice was to consider constructing a raised bed and filling it with bags of compost.

Question: My computer savvy grandson wants to start growing vegetables and other things. I love your phone service, but can UMD's Extension service help him through his computer? Answer: Live Chat is only our latest offering. At www.hgic.umd.edu, we field email questions in our popular "Send A Question" feature. Also through "Send A Question," he can send us digital photos of weeds, insects, diseases or any other unidentified pest or plant he encounters. Videos demonstrate gardening techniques and what invasive plants he’ll want to watch out for. There are a slew of short publications on topics from fruits and flowers to soil and wildlife he can read at his leisure.

AROUND this time every year, I start to think about spring planting. What triggers my thoughts is the arrival in the mail of the first seed catalogs. Reading the thick, colorful guides and looking at the pictures of vegetables ripening on the vine always makes me feel ould soddish, and for weeks after the catalogs arrive I clump around the house in my oversized rubber boots and bib overalls and talk about farmy things -- rows of this, stands of that.The...

The Joppatowne Garden Club participated in the Federated Garden Club's District III May Fair at The Shops at Kenilworth. Shown selling plants are, from left, members Ellie Pfoutz, Betsy King and Sophia Montgomery.

If you have a garden that makes your neighbors green with envy, we want to hear about it. The Baltimore Sun is searching for the most beautiful and creative gardens in the metropolitan area. We'll have our panel of experts select the best small, medium and large gardens. Flower gardens, shade gardens, container gardens and even water gardens will be considered, but they must be designed and tended by amateurs. Winners will be featured in The Sun and will receive a $50 gift card. To submit your entry, send three to five photos and a 200-word description of your garden by email to homes@baltsun.com or by mail to Baltimore Sun Garden Contest, Features Dept., 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore 21278.

They came. They sniffed. They smiled. They sipped. They left - still smiling. That pretty much describes the behavior of guests at last weekend's Spring Has Sprung Tea and Garden Tour at Gramercy Mansion in Stevenson. The nearly 50 participants were split into two groups and each alternately toured the Tudor-style mansion circa 1902 and its gardens at 1400 Greenspring Valley Road. In between their tours, they all sat down together for high tea, which included, along with the tea, served on fine china, four courses of scones with Devon cream, hors d'oeuvres, finger sandwiches, truffles and petite fours.

The Gari Melchers Home & Studio, 224 Washington St., Falmouth, Va. Call 540-654-1844 or go to garimelchers.umw.edu. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Wednesday. The estate is one of the homes taking part in The Garden Club of Virginia's Historic Garden Week, through April 27. Garden tour tickets vary in price, ranging from $15-$40. For a detailed schedule, go to vagardenweek.org or call 804-644-7776. Getting there Fredericksburg is served by Amtrak. It is about a two-hour drive from Baltimore.

Visitors celebrating Virginia's 80th Historic Garden Week at the Gari Melchers Home and Studio at Belmont might not immediately see a connection to Baltimore. The American painter, known for his portraiture, hailed from Detroit. His home, recognized as a National Historic Landmark, is just outside Fredericksburg, Va. It is Melchers' wife, Corinne, who provides the link. Born into a socially prominent Baltimore family in 1880, she married the middle-aged Melchers when she was in her 20s. So what was a nice Baltimore girl doing in Falmouth, Va.?

Don't be alarmed if you hear steam whistles and other loud noises on Saturday, May 4 - they will be emanating from the Fire Museum of Maryland's 36th annual Steam Show . Along with the steam fire engine demonstrations, the show features Dalmatians and draft horses, demonstrations of late-1800s horse-drawn fire engines and rides in an 1899 hose wagon. There will be firefighting contests for the kids, steam engine models to examine and a magician performing inside the museum.

Mums are bee and butterfly magnets Just when I thought the bees and butterflies had disappeared from our garden until spring, I found more visiting our "chrysanthemums" (mums) than I could count. And, during one Indian-summer afternoon, I saw more bees and butterflies on our mums than I'd seen in our garden all summer. Guaranteed to enliven a fall landscape, mums are as popular with people as they are with bees and butterflies. Yet mums were popular with people more than 3,000 years ago, too, when they were first cultivated by the ancient Chinese.

I've been thinking about the presents I'll be giving - and getting, I hope - during the holiday season. I have inexpensive expectations, so folks needn't worry about spending a fortune on me. But if they did have fortunes to spend, I think I'd like to receive an immense rose garden, one as extravagant as Josephine's rose garden was at the Chateau Malmaison. When Empress Josephine and Emperor Napoleon ruled France during the early 1800s, Josephine lived at the Malmaison, a three-story chateau situated upon 4,500 acres on the outskirts of Paris.

Sound Garden, the Fells Point staple and all-around awesome record store, has received another national accolade. In its latest issue, Billboard magazine named the Baltimore shop one of the top 13 independent record stores in the country. Here's what writer Hilary Hughes wrote about Sound Garden: Five thousand people rifle through the shelves and stacks of the Sound Garden on an average day. That number doubles on Record Store Day, and owner Bryan Burkert and his staff work a 14-hour stretch to ensure the in-stores go smoothly - this year, Baltimore's Clutch will be performing - and get patrons the limited pressings they need.

What he does: Tyler Diehl oversees the design, planting and maintenance of 22 acres of lush gardens in Monkton. The Ladew property, which is 250 acres in total, includes a nature walk and 15 “garden rooms,” each with its own theme. While most of the design work takes place in the winter, along with seed-starting and mechanical maintenance, a typical day throughout the year involves cleaning, mulching and pruning. How he got his start: As a child, Diehl enjoyed playing outside, reveling in the plants of his own backyard.  “Then one day somebody said, 'You know, you can go to school for this,' ” he says.