Garden Show

IF CHRISTMAS FLORAL displays, imaginative gift packaging and other holiday ideas and tips appeal to you, check out the annual Christmas show sponsored by the Ferndale Garden Club. "A Cottage Garden 2000" is this year's theme. The show will take place at 7 p.m. Nov. 15 at Michael's Eighth Avenue in Glen Burnie. Tickets are $5 at the door. The evening will begin with an hour of demonstrations and exhibits and holiday music by a mother-son duo - Theresa Will, vocalist, and Dan Will, pianist.

`Art+Fun=BMA Packs' It all adds up to extreme fun at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Visitors can try out the new "Art+Fun=BMA Packs" -- interactive, portable kits created to help folks explore museum exhibits. The packs come in three different themes. Children ages 4 through 12 will take interest in the Costume Pack that lets them dress up to match select paintings. Teens and adults will enjoy the Sketch Pack that comes with pad and paper for their own interpretive doodling. And visitors of all ages will enjoy the Song Pack, which features a collection of original songs inspired by BMA artwork.

Varieties of tomatoes have increased rapidly in recent years, as breeders and growers have attempted to keep up with consumer demand. A picky and apparently insatiable bunch, the tomato-loving public has at times lusted after varieties claiming to be the largest, earliest, meatiest, least-acidic, most compact, or longest-keeping tomatoes. This group has both strong preferences and an astonishing willingness to experiment. (Average orders from some catalogs include 10 varieties.) So what tomatoes have gardeners excited right now?

THE COMMUNITY spirit in Taneytown is contagious these days. It seems that not too many weekends go by without the city or one of its community groups sponsoring a festival, cleanup or other function or celebration.Beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday, the town's economic council will sponsor the Home and Garden Show. Begun last year as the Plant and Flower Mart with 12 vendors, the event's purpose is for people to visit Taneytown, leave their cares behind and enjoy a day at the park -- and in the process learn what a good place Taneytown is, according to Pam Harlow and Melissa Harris, co-chairs of the event.

Anyone who attended the first Taneytown Home and Garden Show last year will not recognize the second and much bigger one scheduled for May 22 at Memorial Park.Last year's show featured about 12 vendors selling plants on the Jubilee grocery store parking lot, said Pam Harlow, a resident who is co-chairwoman of the event.At least, that's what she has been told. She didn't go last year."I didn't even know about it," Harlow said.This year, she and co-chairwoman Melissa Harris expect close to 70 vendors selling plants and crafts, demonstrations on bed planting and building a pond, and rides in a tethered hot-air balloon, weather permitting.

Craft and Folk Art FestivalA juried craft show features the work of 100 craftsmen and artists. This "visually exciting" show includes blown glasswork, eclectic and naive paintings, quilts, turned-wood vessels, designer clothing and jewelry, paint-decorated furniture, hooked and rag rugs, woodcarvings, porcelain lamps, redware pottery and many more one-of-a-kind art objects.The festival will be held Saturday and Sunday at the Community Cultural Center, Northern Virginia Community College, 8333 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, Va. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Maymont Flower & Garden ShowEnter a world of emerald forests and magical meadows as "Once Upon a Garden" blooms at the 1999 Maymont Flower & Garden Show today through Sunday at the Richmond Centre in Richmond, Va. Celebrate the 10th anniversary of Virginia's premier horticultural event as you stroll through gardens of floral fantasy and fairy tales created by the area's landscape designers. Shop the Garden Marketplace and hear gardening tips and tales from the experts. New this year is an authentic English garden designed by Marney Hall, a gold-medal winner at last year's Chelsea Flower Show in England.

By late next month, the air will finally begin to fill with the sweet scents of spring. As the breeze slowly warms, crocus, tulips and daffodils will sprout from softened ground, and red maples, dogwoods and forsythia will start to bud. Grass will begin its slow transformation to green. The birds that wintered quietly in their nests or traveled farther south will gradually reappear, first the fox sparrows, then the robins and eventually the bluebirds. They bring with them their bright colors splashed on a still-gray background and their light-hearted songs.

WHAT DO KIDS enjoy doing? Attend a second-grade hobby show, and you'll be surprised at the intensity 7- and 8-year-olds show for special interests.The hobby show at Spring Garden Elementary took place a week ago. The hobby show at Hampstead Elementary will be at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. May 27.Visitors usually follow a trail through classrooms where children display their hobby atop their desks.Each child writes a couple of paragraphs about his or her hobby and why it is enjoyable.Some Spring Garden students dwell on history.

A million bloomsLet your love of flowers come into bloom at the 38th Annual Washington Flower & Garden Show, "Cherry Blossom Time," where vendors and enthusiasts will converge for a weekend of horticultural heaven.The show will include more than a million blooms and full-sized landscaped gardens such as an Asian garden decorated with Oriental antiques, a golfer's "dream garden" with a putting green and a lavish "relaxation" garden and pond.The feature attraction will be "Containing Eden," a collaborative effort by landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James Van Sweden and the president emeritus of the American Horticultural Society, Dr. H. Marc Cathey.