Landscape Architect

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."

Baltimore's Gwynns Falls Greenway could be the site of the city's first "Growing Center," a supernursery and educational facility where ecologists-in-training could grow flowers and produce for distribution to 20 communities along the trail.Or it could be the setting for "Four Seasons Festivals" featuring historical, ecological and cultural events designed to attract visitors from throughout the region.Or it could be a design laboratory for high school students, who would help create footbridges, benches and other amenities as a way of developing a sense of stewardship.

The cleverest part of a redesigned street-end park in Eastport is one nobody will see. The city of Annapolis, a charitable foundation and a landscape architect are working together on building an underground drainage system that stops dirty rainwater from flowing into Spa Creek by filtering it and channeling the results to irrigate the tree and shrubs on the tiny site. Once construction is finished next month, said Jim Urban, the landscape architect who is also owner of Urban Trees and Soils, visitors will hardly know the park is a rainwater management facility.

The fence is, at least by appearance, unremarkable. It's just a 6-foot-tall construction of plain wooden boards, running between a garden center and one Baltimore County backyard. But it has been the subject of more than 500 pages of correspondence and legal filings, a half-dozen government hearings and three court rulings - all part of a conflict that after more than a decade remains unsettled. "It still hasn't been resolved?" Baltimore County Councilman Joseph Bartenfelder, one of the first county officials involved in the conflict, asked last week when told that the matter was still in dispute.

Carol Oppenheimer describes the garden in front of the old courthouse building in Towson as "magical," so visually arresting that the first time she saw it she nearly caused a car accident swerving to see it closer. To Elyssa Baxter, it's the antithesis of the grass and concrete expanses that ordinarily fill public outdoor spaces. And it reminds Holly Sefter of the lush public squares that have made Savannah, Ga., famous. But a consultant is recommending that changes be made to the favorite spot of many Towson gardeners, residents and county workers - just a year after a team of planners recommended that the garden be plowed over.

TC Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!What could say that better than a giant crab sculpture in the middle of Rash Field? Or a simulated row of brick houses with marble steps along Light Street? How about miniature replicas of Fort McHenry, the B&O Railroad Museum and the city markets, right by the waterfront?Architects and planners have all sorts of ideas for improving Baltimore's famed Inner Harbor shoreline. But they seem to agree on one thing: When it comes right down to it, there really isn't much of Baltimore in the Inner Harbor.

Dale Edwin LloydLandscape architectDale Edwin Lloyd, a landscape architect whose design expertise was applied to many health and educational institutions, died June 8 of congestive heart failure at his Towson residence. He was 78.Mr. Lloyd retired in 1987 from Lloyd-Smith Associates, which he established with Richard Smith in 1958. After his retirement, the firm was dissolved and his interest sold to Mr. Smith.Mr. Lloyd moved to Baltimore in 1953 from Cincinnati, where he was a city planner, and went to work for the old Baltimore County Department of Education and Recreation.

It's nearly March. Your New Year's resolutions were pitched out weeks ago. But a vow you made last August, the one inspired by sweeps of lavender and gold- and red-fleckedgrasses along roads, by clusters of Shasta daisies and china-blue salvia in friends' yards -- that vow remains.You resolved to have more than sod and sidewalk on your little corner of the earth in 1997. You resolved to have a beautiful garden. And now is the perfect time to plan it. The problem is, you don't know an aspidistra from a hole in the ground.

Since the Archdiocese of Baltimore declared its intent last spring to demolish a 100-year-old midtown apartment building to better show off its famed Basilica of the Assumption, local groups have taken sides. Preservationists rushed to protect the Rochambeau, a seven-story Renaissance Revival structure whose absence, they say, would forever mar one of Baltimore's most historic corridors. Business and cultural institutions, meanwhile, have lobbied for the church and the mighty tourist draw of its restored basilica, a historical gem in its own right.

Since the Archdiocese of Baltimore declared its intent last spring to demolish a 100-year-old midtown apartment building to better show off its famed Basilica of the Assumption, local groups have taken sides. Preservationists rushed to protect the Rochambeau, a seven-story Renaissance Revival structure whose absence, they say, would forever mar one of Baltimore's most historic corridors. Business and cultural institutions, meanwhile, have lobbied for the church and the mighty tourist draw of its restored basilica, a historical gem in its own right.