Landscape Architect

Wolfgang Oehme, a renowned landscape architect and a founder of the New American Garden movement, which incorporated windblown ornamental grasses and massed perennial plantings, died of cancer Thursday at his Towson home. He was 81. "He was a consummate landscape architect," said his business partner, Carol Oppenheimer of Pikesville. "He was a plant genius whose intellect is recognized all over the world. " In the 1970s, he became known as the "Grass Pope" because of the plants he introduced in this country.

On a fall day, the landscape in northern Baltimore County looks pretty marvelous. Even the old-fashioned rural roads seem unobtrusive. It's hard not to think: Why hasn't all this gorgeous landscape been ruined, as close as it is to downtown Baltimore? It's taken me a while to realize why the areas such as the Worthington and Greenspring valleys remain so unspoiled. This week, at a little Victorian house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Towson, I held a 50-year-old report whose precepts have cast a long shadow.

Mary Ellen Bay, a landscape architect and flower arranger, died July 3 at Carroll Hospital Center after suffering a coronary embolism. She was 74. Mary Ellen Denny, the daughter of farmers, was born and raised in Wye Mills on the Eastern Shore. She was a graduate of Centreville High School. She studied engineering for 31/2 years at the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art . Mrs. Bay was a certified interior and landscape designer, and worked for more than 40 years as a freelance design consultant on gardens, residential additions and interiors.

Catherine Mahan founded a landscape architecture firm in 1983 on the first floor of a Mount Vernon rowhouse. She had four employees and scraped by at first doing jobs for local architects and designing backyards for homeowners. When she retired from Mahan Rykiel Associates this year, the Baltimore-based firm had 42 employees, an office in Hong Kong and a long list of completed projects in the United States, Portugal, Japan and Mexico. Under Mahan's guidance, the firm has handled many local projects as well: It designed rooftop gardens for Harbor East's high-rise residences and for Mercy Medical Center, created a backdrop for the infinity pool deck at the new Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, redesigned Center Plaza in downtown's office district, landscaped the light rail line and created the plazas at Oriole Park at Camden Yards . The firm has worked out of the former Stieff Silver building in Hampden since 2001.

Elliott Russell, a retired landscape architect who had worked for a Baltimore engineering firm for more than three decades, died of respiratory failure Monday at Howard County General Hospital. He was 89. Mr. Russell was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a bachelor's degree in forestry in 1944 from Utah State University. He was drafted into the Army and served in the Quartermaster Corps for two years. He was discharged in 1946. Mr. Russell owned a landscaping business and nursery for several years in Bridgeport, Conn.

Frederick D. Jarvis, a landscape architect and professional planner who designed golf and waterfront communities across the country, died of a heart attack Thursday at his home in Columbia. He was 61. Mr. Jarvis built and remodeled his five-story cedar home several times during the last 25 years. Although he made his living designing parks and outdoor landscapes, he called himself a "frustrated architect at heart." Not only did he draw all the architectural plans for the last extensive renovation, he also made a detailed scale model of the home.

John P. Donofrio, a nationally acclaimed landscape architect whose artful combinations of plants, trees, stone and natural elements created what he called "outdoor paintings," died of lung cancer Monday at the Westminster home of his daughter. He was 78 and lived in Mount Washington. Mr. Donofrio, who was born in Geneva, N.Y., was the son of an Italian immigrant father. He grew up in Westminster, where his father established Carroll Gardens, a perennial nursery, on Main Street. After graduating from Westminster High School in 1942, he studied horticulture for a year at the University of Maryland, College Park.

On March 5, General Growth Properties will host the first speaker in a series of public forums to introduce its design and planning team, which is working on the master plan for downtown Columbia. Alan Ward is a landscape architect and urban designer at Sasaki Associates Inc., with more than 30 years of experience. His accomplishments include acting as principal landscape architect responsible for winning the international design competition to develop the master plan for the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and for the development of Reston Town Center in Virginia.

As a Towson elementary school student, Keith Bowers took a field trip to Columbia during the 1960s to watch the town being built and to walk on one of the trails that wind beneath an overpass. Decades later, the 48-year-old landscape architect, founder and president of Biohabitats Inc., is looking at ways to protect, conserve and restore Columbia's land, streambeds and woodlands as downtown becomes more populated. Bowers, whose ecological restoration design, planning and assessment business is part of the downtown design team that General Growth Properties Inc. has put together, led a public forum Wednesday to introduce his company.

John Philip Gutting, a landscape architect who was an early promoter of planting local indigenous species to create natural settings, died of a heart attack Dec. 31 at his Church Hill home. He was 63. He was hailed in Native Plants magazine in 2003 as a "regional pioneer in the use of native plants for more than 30 years." He was a proponent of protecting natural surroundings. "John was a committed environmentalist with an unequaled passion for trying to create landscape vistas that were beautiful, inviting, unique and true to the idea of using native species that belonged in their place," said Don Jackson, the director of operations at St. John's College in Annapolis, where Mr. Gutting had completed several projects.

Towson resident Wolfgang Oehme, an internationally renowned landscape architect whose designs revolutionized American - and Towson - landscaping died from cancer Dec. 15 at his home in Aigburth Vale. He was 80. County police became accustomed to seeing Oehme lurking around the Old Courthouse in downtown Towson at midnight or 2 a.m. while other people slept. Oehme designed Courthouse Gardens with county landscape architect Avery Harden in 1988. "He couldn't stand to see a garden abused by weeds," former county planning director Les Graef said.

Wolfgang Oehme, a renowned landscape architect and a founder of the New American Garden movement, which incorporated windblown ornamental grasses and massed perennial plantings, died of cancer Thursday at his Towson home. He was 81. "He was a consummate landscape architect," said his business partner, Carol Oppenheimer of Pikesville. "He was a plant genius whose intellect is recognized all over the world. " In the 1970s, he became known as the "Grass Pope" because of the plants he introduced in this country.

Where do bats live? What do spiders eat? How old is the forest? The answers to those and many other questions can be found at the James and Anne Robinson Nature Center, a $17.6 million educational facility that opened this month in Columbia. With two levels of interactive exhibits set amid 18.3 wooded acres, the center is Howard County's new front door to nature, a year-round attraction that invites visitors to learn about the surrounding landscape and then go and explore it. Owned by Howard County and operated by its Department of Recreation and Parks, the nature center is named after a couple who lived on the land for many years and wanted to share it with the community.

Mary Ellen Bay, a landscape architect and flower arranger, died July 3 at Carroll Hospital Center after suffering a coronary embolism. She was 74. Mary Ellen Denny, the daughter of farmers, was born and raised in Wye Mills on the Eastern Shore. She was a graduate of Centreville High School. She studied engineering for 31/2 years at the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art . Mrs. Bay was a certified interior and landscape designer, and worked for more than 40 years as a freelance design consultant on gardens, residential additions and interiors.

As a Towson elementary school student, Keith Bowers took a field trip to Columbia during the 1960s to watch the town being built and to walk on one of the trails that wind beneath an overpass. Decades later, the 48-year-old landscape architect, founder and president of Biohabitats Inc., is looking at ways to protect, conserve and restore Columbia's land, streambeds and woodlands as downtown becomes more populated. Bowers, whose ecological restoration design, planning and assessment business is part of the downtown design team that General Growth Properties Inc. has put together, led a public forum Wednesday to introduce his company.

Elliott Russell, a retired landscape architect who had worked for a Baltimore engineering firm for more than three decades, died of respiratory failure Monday at Howard County General Hospital. He was 89. Mr. Russell was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a bachelor's degree in forestry in 1944 from Utah State University. He was drafted into the Army and served in the Quartermaster Corps for two years. He was discharged in 1946. Mr. Russell owned a landscaping business and nursery for several years in Bridgeport, Conn.

KERMIT THE FROG was right. It's not easy being green, and here's why: Environmentalism is the curmudgeonly brake, grinding to restrain that heady, high-revving, wondrous engine, the economy. Befitting brakemen, the language of us greenies is laced with words like limits, avoid, minimize, reduce, minimize, sacrifice, regulate. Right now, it has to be that way. For all our talk of "win-win" solutions, the faster our modern industrial economy runs, the worse nature usually fares. It's a hell of a thing that a homebuilding recession is among our more reliable protectors of open space; that a drought, cutting runoff from farms and streets, is the only way we clear up Chesapeake waters.

If you ask Alan Ward what's lacking in downtown Columbia, the landscape architect and urban designer working on the Town Center master plan will tell you that it's pedestrians, along with a sense of connection and vitality as you walk. "What's missing is an urban, residential environment," Ward, a principal with Sasaki Associates Inc., said in an interview last week. "There are pockets of residential, but it doesn't add up to the street life like you'd expect in an urban neighborhood. I think the expectations are to make it more lively and to make it more of a destination."