Garden

Gardeners get a fresh start every year. Glossy catalogs full of new plants, ideas and inspiration fill the mailbox in January, and before you know it, you're making lists, plans and decisions. The New Year is upon us, but it's really never too late to make New Year's resolutions, and gardening resolutions are the kind you won't regret. A gardener's resolutions don't have to involve giving anything up. When you resolve to make your garden more beautiful, the changes don't have to be expensive or difficult or involve plants with names you can't pronounce.

A new community center will be opened and the Rouse-Hobbs garden and streetscape mural will be dedicated at 9: 30 a.m. today at Winchester and Gilmor streets in the Sandtown-Winchester area of West Baltimore.The mural and garden honor the late William L. Hobbs, a pianist and orchestra manager who worked with Community Building in Partnership in Sandtown-Winchester, and the late developer James W. Rouse, who established the Enterprise Foundation, which helps provide affordable housing for the poor.

On the cusp of a new millennium, an ancient idea in gardening is back in vogue.Urns -- most recently ever-present in Victorian gardens or conservatories -- are everywhere. The classic Greco-Roman shape, with a pedestal base and bowl or vase-shaped top, is still a graceful touch in almost any garden, large or small."Classic styling goes with everything," said Melissa Darnay, marketing manager at American Designer Pottery. The Dallas-based company has recently introduced a line of urns that are made, not of the traditional metal or stone, but of synthetic material that weighs only a tenth as much.

Q. I've noticed that a lot of heirloom tomato varieties are showing up in my seed catalogs. They promise better flavor, but are they worth it if they produce less? And do the heirlooms get more diseases?A. Many of the tried-and-true heirloom cultivars of years past are indeed making a comeback. In many cases, the yields between old varieties and modern hybrids are comparable. As for the disease issue, fusarium wilt is a significant disease to which most hybrids are resistant and most old cultivars are susceptible.

If you have ever put an interesting pebble in your pocket, leaned against a warm rock on a sunny day or skipped along a stepping-stone path -- even if it was a long time ago -- you know something about the beauty and mystery of stone. Every garden ought to have a little bit of that."Stone is a material with history and legacy," says Jan Kowalczewski Whitner, a Seattle-area garden designer and author of "Gardening With Stone" (Macmillan, $39.95). "When I work with stone I'm tapping into history."

Elizabeth Clarke's childhood home on the Delaware River -- a property with large gardens and a greenhouse -- instilled a love of plants that led her from a job at a seed company to a role that she considered her greatest achievement -- founder of a garden preserve that eventually became Cylburn Arboretum.Miss Clarke, who supervised nature and garden activities for the Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks for nearly 30 years, died Wednesday at Charlestown Care Center of complications from a stroke she suffered in 1994.

THIRTEEN YEARS ago this month, I was squinting into the low, spring sun, smiling in satisfaction at a carefully groomed vegetable garden. Despite my clumsy weight, I had managed to plant a crop of lettuce and spinach, and I felt that I was ahead of the game.I was. But so was my daughter, who was born hours later and a whole month early.Since then, her March birthday has always arrived with a sense of urgency for me. "My garden should be in by now," I fret to myself. "I am late."Kids will make you late for everything, from church to bed. There have been years when my lettuce and spinach seeds never made it out of their colorful packets.

Garden tourStroll through the garden at the Baltimore Conservatory on Sunday during its "Afternoon in the Garden." Enjoy guided tours, garden lectures, refreshments and more. Avid and novice gardeners can learn gardening tips, and non-gardeners can savor the sights and scents of the lavish garden. The event is sponsored by the Baltimore Conservatory and the Conservatory Association.The event runs from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Baltimore Conservatory, Druid Hill Park, McCulloh Street and Gwynns Falls Parkway.

Trees and shrubs establish the year-round lines of your landscape. Summer annuals add the zing.Feed them regularly and they will continue to entertain you with color until fall frost arrives.Why the name annual? A plant is an annual when it flowers, produces seed and dies within a single growing season. Many of what we call annuals are actually perennials in more tropical areas.Coleus, geraniums, impatiens and begonias are planted as annuals in this area but they can be brought indoors to winter in your home and then returned to the garden each spring after frost is past.

MY 15-YEAR-OLD found me on all fours in the dirt, and he shook his head in resigned disapproval."You're gar- dening again, aren't you?" he said."What powers of observation," I said.He ignored my sarcasm and asked why I put so much energy into my flowers as opposed to, say, his dinner. I told him I wasn't sure why, but that gardening seemed to drain me and recharge me at the same time."Kind of like, `Out with the bad, in with the good,' " I said."You should wait until Jessie and I are out of the house," Joe said.

Has anyone noticed what an incredible gardening season this has been for Baltimore? By mid-September, my backyard normally looks dried up and ready for plowing under. The brown grass requires a deep raking, handfuls of new seed and prayers. Not this year. Urban growing conditions are usually so bad, I throw in my trowel and buy hothouse-grown pots of mums and asters to overcome the damage created by the August mini-droughts we normally get. This year, I've had to find every stake in my cellar to prop up plants that have grown to Jack-and the-Beanstalk proportions because of the overly generous rain.

If you believe that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was staged in Hollywood; that Marilyn Monroe was killed by the Kennedy family and Lady Diana by the royal family ... If you believe that FDR allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to facilitate America's entry into World War II and the Bush administration brought down the Twin Towers with explosive charges and holograms in order to provoke a war for oil ... If you believe that President Obama was...

It is August in the garden, and the energy of spring has evaporated like the dew - for the garden and the gardener. What looked so fresh and promising in May looks scraggly and wilted now, and the punishing heat and drought of late summer in the Mid-Atlantic saps the will to do anything about it. If I wait a little longer, the gardener tells herself, it will be time for mums and this awkward phase in the garden cycle will be forgotten. In spring, we haunt the garden centers and purchase what is blooming at the moment, doubling down our investment in early-season color.

I was a sportswriter when my bosses asked me if I wanted to be a family-life columnist. That was years ago. I had a pretty good idea of what a family-life columnist was, and I'd certainly never aspired to be one. They wanted me to write about my life as a wife and the working mother of school-age children. That was not anything any journalist who came of age in the Watergate era wanted to write about. "But I don't have a life," I objected. "My career is in the Dumpster. My home life is chaos.

It was a salad that got started by mistake. I was in the garden, weeding between the shallots, when the blade from the weeding tool accidentally nicked a shallot. It was an inadvertent harvest. This happens more often than I care to admit. I will be puttering around and I uproot something or step on some promising crop. It is a part of gardening, and I have learned to salvage dishes from these unwitting moves. The other day, for instance, the suddenly harvested shallot became part of the dressing for a salad.

It sat in the kitchen for days, looming over me as I ate. It seemed to be asking, when am I going to be invited to a meal? It was the butternut squash that came to dinner, forcibly. I had not planted it in my garden; instead the squash imposed itself into my life, with savory results. The tale began in the heat of summer, when a squash vine sprouted in a neighbor's plot in our community gardens in Druid Hill Park. Quicker than kudzu, the vine jumped a fence dividing our gardens and made itself at home in my plot.

A lover of Asian art and design, Thompson turned an unattractive backyard patio into a Japanese-themed garden -- complete with a dry stream bed and a dog kennel that resembles a Japanese tea house. Read about her garden and see more pictures tomorrow at baltimoresun.com / gardener.

The groundhog seemed surprised when I made an impromptu visit to the vegetable garden this week. It was about 1 o'clock on a weekday afternoon. The groundhog had just lunched on a row of green beans. He looked at me as if to say, "Shouldn't you be in the office?" Then, he took off. He paused at the fence ringing the garden and shot me another glance. This time he seemed to be saying, "Are we really going to go through this charade? Are you going to try to `scare' me?" I took a few steps in his direction.

Summer has a way of getting away from me. The other day, I went shopping for some summer cotton neckties, maybe madras. (Baltimore bargain-hunter that I am, I thought they might be reduced.) A sales clerk clued me in: I should have done my buying back in May before they all sold out. Another friend warns that summer slips away quickly after July 4; the All Star break is my alarm to make something out of these days. My first Eastern Shore tomatoes of the summer disappeared on a platter a couple of nights ago. My guests made more over them than the other dishes, which took more effort.

DRAGONFLY GARDEN 188 Main St., Annapolis, 410-295-5677 / Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday-Saturday / noon-6 p.m. Sunday What happens when a busy attorney realizes she is happiest "playing in the dirt?" She opens a tiny storefront in Historic Annapolis and fills it with decorative arts for the garden: wind chimes, hummingbird feeders, garden lights, candles, pots and planters, birdhouses and whirligigs. "I just kind of woke up one morning and realized that I was happiest in my garden. I wanted that feeling all day every day, and I didn't find that happiness at work," said Ellen Schwanebeck, 35, who graduated from Syracuse law school and worked as an antitrust attorney in Washington for eight years.