Garden Design

Successful garden design represents collaboration between people and nature. Professional garden designers specialize in managing that collaboration, and working with a great designer allows you to skip the fumbling and the mistakes and start enjoying a beautiful garden. Landscape designers make it their job to interpret and realize your vision for your garden. In the hands of a good designer, a front walk isn't just a runway into the house, but a pleasant journey home. A patio becomes a refuge from the busy world, and well-chosen trees, shrubs and flowers turn an unremarkable lot into the prettiest place on the block.

Rock gardening usually starts small, in an area about the size of the bottom of an aquarium -- and just as gravelly -- and then takes on a life of its own. Like a weakness for paperweights or baseball cards, it becomes something of a passion. Rock gardens and all the diminutive but tough plants that thrive in them are evocative of hard, lonely landscapes in the mountains or the desert, and they can get a grip on your imagination in the middle of a lush temperate-zone garden. The plants that thrive in what would otherwise be considered difficult conditions -- lean soil and not much water -- are widely available.

It's a great time to be a history buff, with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War upon us. And there are plenty of other ways to delight history lovers with unique gifts. 1. Tour the United States Naval Academy through black and white photography, from the institution's early days to recent times. The nearly 200 photos in the hardback "Historic Photos of United States Naval Academy" book come from the academy's storehouse, the Library of Congress and other archives. By author James Cheevers.

If you can't afford the couch, think about buying the adviceWhile almost any interior designer will be glad to work with what you have for a fee -- if you need help rearranging your living room furniture, for instance -- most don't make that the cornerstone of their business.Enter Nancy Pappas and Lauren Hwang.The two women have a background in design and last managed the Handblock and April Cornell stores. They decided to start their own business, says Ms. Pappas, "because so many people want to have a decorator come in but feel they can't afford it."

Three weeks ago, the Highlandtown storefront was empty and apparently without prospects. On Saturday, the space was filled with holiday wreath-making, carefully crafted plant arrangements and free coffee. The rapid transformation into a "pop-up" shop was the handiwork of organizers from the Southeast Community Development Corp. In a few days, the space will be clear once more, but the community group wants to leave behind a message about the vitality of business in Highlandtown.

Since the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, gardeners have used pots to accent and punctuate, to add depth, height, color and definition to a space. A massive tub for a Lebanese cedar, hanging clay pots for draping annuals, stone urns for ferns, and even an empty amphora as a simple but distinctive focal point. "At one place we used a ribbed antique oil jar that stands three feet tall," says Jay Graham, president of Graham Landscape Architecture in Annapolis. "It didn't need plants in it, since it had plants all around."

Ornamental grasses are like universal guests. They enhance any gathering because they can be stars on their own, yet make everything else around them more vividly interesting. "Ornamental grasses are beautiful mixed in a perennial border, are good in pots, and some make great specimen plants," says Monika Burwell, owner of Earthly Pursuits, a perennial and garden design company in Windsor Mill. Tall and graceful, or squat and spreading, they also whisper romantically, in even the gentlest breeze.

Make a wreath, and maybe save your marriage. Sure, it's just a bunch of twigs and pods looped together and hung on the front door or in the entry hall. But the seasonal wreath can do more for a relationship in 15 minutes than Dr. Phil can do in, well, 16 minutes. See if you recognize this holiday scenario: People are coming to your house. After 96 hours of scrubbing and straightening, you, the gardener, have finished your duties. The chef, however, is still elbow-deep in cranberry stuffing.

FESTIVAL OF INDIA Celebrate the Indian Festival of Chariots at Baltimore's fifth annual Hare Krishna Rathayatra Chariot Parade downtown Saturday. The parade and the Festival of India will celebrate Indian culture with live music, drama, art and a free vegetarian feast. Parade participants will pull a 30-foot-high chariot down Light Street by hand alongside musicians and dancers until they reach McKeldin Square, where the Festival of India will take place. .................... The parade runs noon-2 p.m. Saturday, beginning at Key Highway and Light Street at the Inner Harbor, and proceeds to McKeldin Square at Pratt and Light streets.

What was an unsightly tangle of overgrown grass and weeds has been transformed into a peaceful urban garden off busy Spa Road in Annapolis. But this garden isn't just for the eyes. It's a garden for all the senses. The blind can feel the wind blowing through tall grass and smell the fragrant bayberry and magnolia plants. People in wheelchairs can navigate extra-wide pathways and dig their hands into the soil to plant flowers in elevated plots. Funded for the state's millennium celebration, the MaryLandscapes garden that opened yesterday at the Arc of Anne Arundel County is one of 37 across the state specially cultivated with native plants and flowers.