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.

Summer arrives early in the state capital with the opening of the Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre's 46th season of presenting "theater under the stars," which begins May 24 with Cole Porter's classic "Anything Goes. " The musical, the updated, 2011 Tony Award-winner, will run Thursdays through Sundays through June 24. Following it are two shows that have never been performed at Summer Garden. Taking ASGT's outdoor stage July 5 to July 29 is "Avenue Q," the 2003 surprise Broadway hit that captured three Tony Awards, including best musical.

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.

I used to have dozens of monarch butterflies in my garden — now almost none. How can I attract them again? Research showed that the precipitous decline in monarchs a couple of years ago was mainly because of extreme weather, illegal logging in Mexico and herbicide use, which have almost wiped out the food source of monarchs — milkweed. We can't counter the first two causes but we can plant milkweed or ornamentals in the milkweed family such as butterfly weed. Without a food source for monarch caterpillars to eat, there can be no monarchs.

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...

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.

Unlike weird Uncle Joe, who hates everything, or rich Aunt Maude, who has everything, gardeners are easy to buy gifts for because there's so much we love. In addition to grubbing around in the garden (for which hand salve, kneepads and other protective gear are always good), we love continual bloom -- hence bulbs for indoor forcing and winter-blooming plants like jasmine or the exotic (and expensive) clivia. We love gardening gadgets and quirky but useful tools. We love things to decorate our gardens with, whether antique or artsy, functional or frivolous.

There is a fresh grave in the back yard, sweat on my brow and a tear in my eye. I just buried Timmy, my little gardening buddy.Timmy is resting beneath a crab apple tree, near the garden he loved, a garden made poorer by the passing of this dusty orange alley cat who roamed its border for 16 years.Summer won't be the same without him.Timmy gave soul to the garden. He liked to crouch in the dense summer foliage, a wannabe lion lunging boldly at prey that passed his way. Timmy pounced on scores of unsuspecting beetles and grasshoppers.

It's early when Lewis Sharpe stops between a long row of collards and a mixed row of tomatoes and okra and runs his finger across his forehead beneath his big straw hat. "Day like this, shade is starting to look pretty good," he says to his friend, George Ghee. A few rows of corn and string beans away, Ghee is picking greens. "Uh-huh," he answers. With two plastic grocery bags already filled nearly to bursting, he shows no sign of slowing. In the summer, days fall into a pattern set by the garden.

Two city water meter readers turned in phony numbers in at least two neighborhoods in recent months, the Department of Public Works acknowledged Tuesday, leading to more inaccurate billing by an agency that has been troubled by aging infrastructure and high error rates. As the Bureau of Water and Wastewater tries to correct the mistakes, residents who were undercharged are seeing a spike in their water charges - and officials say they must pay. The latest twist in the city's water billing problems, which have affected at least one in 10 local homeowners, did not go over well in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Homeland, where residents were already angry about the unusually high charges.

B'more Green generally stays away from touting commercial products or companies, largely because we lack the time or resources to vet them.  But my green-thumbed colleague Susan Reimer passed this along, and it seemed too worthwhile to ignore: Nature Hills Nursery , which claims to be the largest online nursery and garden center in the nation, is offering to award a total of $4,500 in plants, shrubs and trees to four noteworthy community gardening...

George's, which takes up a fair portion of the first floor of the Peabody Court Hotel, has a warm inviting atmosphere. It couples a bed and breakfast sensibility with a leather-couchy, dimly lit lounge area that makes for a decent dining - and especially drinking - experience. Bartender John Hartz and crew recently redesigned their drink menu to include a wide range of classic cocktails and one particularly refreshing gin drink: The Garden. The Garden's name may conjure images of floral notes, bright colors and sweet tastes, and you'd be mostly right.

The new Miller library branch in Ellicott City will open its Enchanted Garden next weekend, an outdoor learning space that will be one of the few nationwide to be owned and tended by a public library. The space, which will offer classes and activities related to nutrition, environmental science and gardening, was named for the now-defunct Enchanted Forest amusement park on nearby U.S. 40. There will also be programs on meditation, acupuncture, insects and painting in the new space, said Rita Hamlet, the development specialist in charge of the quarter-acre garden.

The upcoming weekend is chock-full of green activities. Here are just some: Saturday is "Climate Impacts Day," meaning environmentalists intend to stage a flurry of demonstrations to get people to "connect the dots" between climate change and extreme weather. Folks will be donning gas masks to highlight their concerns during the "cyclovia" bike-walk from Roland Park to Druid Hill Park. Others will be kayaking amid the drowning wetlands at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, while still others plan to celebrate the installation of another solar array in Howard County.

With its dandelions, clover and discarded cigarette butts, the little "bioswale" in front of the Salvation Army community center in West Baltimore won't win any lawn-care prizes. But the shallow, weedy depression collects rainfall washing off an acre of litter-strewn pavement and filters out pollution that otherwise would foul the harbor. City officials and nonprofit leaders took federal environmental officials on a whirlwind tour Tuesday of Franklin Square to show them how they're trying to clean the ailing harbor by greening the blighted neighborhoods that drain into it. The keys to healthier waters, they explained, lie in improving the quality of life of the people who live by those waters.

Ferns have found a steadfast friend in Jim Orband. He believes their soothing looks and easy personalities deserve all the respect and use they can get in any kind of garden -- big or small, country or city, formal or informal. "So many people don't include ferns in their landscape, and they're really missing out on some nice plants," says Orband, Virginia Cooperative Extension's horticulture agent in York County, Va. He also practices what he preaches in his small but densely planted garden in Yorktown, Va. There, more than 20 types of ferns are tucked among large shrubs such as hydrangea, nandina, fatsia and mahonia.

GINNY MATTHIAS of Glenelg loves her work. It combines her hobby -- gardening -- with her former profession, counseling. But most important, what she does makes a difference in the lives of other people. Matthias works in horticultural therapy which, as she explains it, means "using plants in a therapeutic way." She runs gardening programs for senior citizens at St. Ann Adult Services and St. Elizabeth Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, both in Catonsville, as well as several retirement communities.

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. Flower gardens, vegetable gardens, shade gardens, container gardens and even water gardens will be considered, but they must be designed and tended by amateurs. The winners will be featured in The Sun this summer and will receive a $50 garden center gift card. To submit your entry, send 3-5 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, MD 21278.

"Cleaner ways don't win wars. " -- Stannis Baratheon Everyone say it together now: Crazy shadow-demon birth! If the character of Melisandre hadn't drawn you in yet in "Game of Throne's" second season, I'm betting she had by the end of episode four, "Garden of Bones. " As the episode (a strong first effort by writer Vanessa Taylor) came to a close, Melisandre gives birth to King Stannis' shadow-demon son (who, if the show is consistent with the books, is the image of Stannis, himself)