Nursery

To a chorus of tiny cries in the busy second-floor nursery, Vivian B. Snead has one emphatic reply, in a voice that is squeaky yet destined to calm:"Granny's here!"Ms. Snead, 72, routinely scrubs up, dons a gown and surgical gloves, and commences scooping up fragile newborns at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she has personally rocked to sleep hundreds over the past six years.The nationally recognized program is a forerunner to about two dozen around the country that have put elderly people in nurseries to hold, feed and diaper infants -- leaving both in the relationship feeling better.

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...

The news may be full of economic woes, but inside the Baltimore Convention Center at the Mid-Atlantic Nurserymen's Trade Show a couple of weeks ago, recession seemed to be far from anyone's mind. For the first time, all five halls on the main floor were filled."Everything about the show was up," said Carville M. Akehurst, who has been managing the show for the past 20 years."Besides all kinds of buying and selling, the number of companies sending representatives was up significantly," he noted, to 1,966.

Timothy S. Reuwer, an artist who was the co-owner of the Happy Hollow plant nursery, died of cancer Friday at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Cockeysville resident was 59. Born in Baltimore and raised in Hunt Valley, he attended the Boys' Latin School and Baltimore County public schools. Nearly 30 years ago, he and Sue Bloodgood, who would become his wife, founded Happy Hollow Nursery in Cockeysville. They cultivated and sold numerous varieties of day lilies and hostas, among other perennials.

The 19 girls of Brownie Troop 299 have learned that good deeds do pay off.Nearly a month ago, the girls planted 14 day lilies in front of Swann Park in Crofton. But two days later, the yellow flowers were plucked from their beds.Yesterday, the girls replaced the original plants with 14 new ones, also with yellow blooms, thanks to representatives of a Davidsonville nursery who heard about the girls' plight and decided to help."It seemed like a nice gesture," said Michael Fountain, advertising manager at Homestead Gardens.

A 46-year-old Clarksville nursery is up for sale after its founder, who is terminally ill, closed the business.The owners of Cherry Brae, a 22 1/2 -acre nursery, say they hope to find a buyer for the nursery soon. Founder George James Simpson, 68, and his son, David Simpson, have run the nursery together for the last 10 years.The nursery is still running its wholesale operation but has been scaling down its retail section over the last few months, closing it in January.The Simpson family has farmed in Clarksville since the early 1800s.

Louis F. Dubbert, who ran a family-owned nursery at Falls Road and Northern Parkway for nearly 30 years, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. He was 77. For many years, after opening in 1952, Dubbert's Nursery and Flower Shop was one of the most prominent in the city. Begun by Mr. Dubbert's father, August Charles Dubbert, it continued under the direction of his son in 1959, although Louis Dubbert decided to eliminate the flower shop and concentrate on landscaping.

John and Dotty Metzler of Columbia increased their living space recently by "going outdoors," so to speak.They built an addition that doubled the size of their home under roof, then added an elaborate deck and garden. "We wanted to be outdoors a lot," says Mr. Metzler, operator of one of the area's largest professional nurseries.Nicholas Klopp, a Howard County architect who is a native of South America, educated at the University of Michigan, came up with a design for the addition that manages to be both contemporary and yet traditional, linking an older, four-square dwelling of 1903 with a dramatic new deck and garden area.

Seventy of the 86 suspected illegal immigrants arrested Tuesday in a raid on a Kent County nursery will be voluntarily deported today, according to the Baltimore director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, who yesterday defended the conduct of his agents during the operation.The 70 Mexican citizens will be flown on a government charter, due to leave Baltimore-Washington International Airport about 1 p.m., to Harlingen, Texas, where they will board a bus and be transported across the border, said Benedict J. Ferro, head of the INS office in Baltimore.

Men accused of stealing 12 walkie-talkies, a stereo system, a telephone and two cellular telephones worth $2,500 from a Columbia nursery this week were arrested after authorities followed a trail of radio waves.Howard County police and a federal official followed the radio transmissions and arrested three men -- two of them brothers -- Tuesday afternoon and charged them with burglary.On Monday, Hans Metzler, who owns Metzler's Nursery at 10342 Owen Brown Road, reported the theft, which occurred between Sunday evening's closing and Monday morning's opening.

The flowers are not the only things in bloom at Kroh's Nursery year after year. In fact, this family business has deep roots that continue to grow in this Aberdeen nursery. In 1980, husband and wife, Robert and Mickie Sachs purchased Kroh's Nursery because they wanted to spend the rest of their lives working in a nursery and garden center. And after high school, their son Jeff started working the family business. Today, Jeff runs the day-to-day operations and says, “I started working in the nursery with my parents when I was just 10 years old. I remember holidays and Mother's Day, which are the busiest days of the year for us.” Though Robert and Mickie still work at the nursery today, Jeff Sachs runs the business and has expanded what they offer with custom design/build landscape services including hand crafted stone walls and patios, garden pools and waterfalls, and landscape maintenance.

How cute is this??? This is Damai, a two-week-old orangutan, a baby girl. Her name means peace.  She's being cared for at the Surabaya Zoo nursery in Indonesia because her mother refused to do it.

In this week's "Amazing Race", the teams travel to Thailand and I appoint heroes and a villain. I'll also sort various forms of preparation into Useful, Not Useful and Other. So last week, the Snowboarders and Navigational Experts Laurence and Zac teamed up and finished in first and second place. Laurence and Zac, who will be called Dad & Zac for now, maintain that strategy and take the same flight to Jakarta as the Snowboarders. Unfortunately, not booking all the way through to Thailand means that they miss the flight that everyone else gets on, and they arrive an hour later than the pack.

From Jay Hancock's blog: A column about BGE's smart meters last month had a throwaway line about how digital meters could blow the whistle on your marijuana grow lights. I hadn't thought much about it, but that's what people seem to believe will happen on a large scale in British Columbia, which is to pot what Texas is to oil. It's not that pot growers are using metered kilowatts to grow their weed. Rather, they're pirating electricity by tapping the lines and routing it, unmetered, to their nurseries.

Performer Mark Ruegg came up with the idea for his interactive rock concert, "Party Animals" while trying to coax smiles from one of the toughest audiences imaginable — children of celebrities. Ruegg was hired to provide the youth entertainment for such Hollywood celebrities as Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, and was determined to reproduce the over-the-top extravaganzas in which he participated for everyday kids. "You can't imagine what birthday parties in Hollywood are like," said Ruegg's wife, the dancer and aerialist Buffy Hornung.

Dramatic and musical presentation takes place at 10:30 a.m. today at Anchor Baptist Church, 320 W. Pasadena Road in Millersville. Nursery will be provided for children 3 and younger. Free. Also, a candlelight service will be held there from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Dec. 24. For more information, call 410-647-9614.

Martin Miller and Ivan Leshinsky water, watch and worry over dozens of tree seedlings in their Brooklyn nursery -- not unlike their nurturing of troubled juveniles."

In an age when time and feet are at a premium, two holiday staples are now only a phone call away. Yes, Virginia, the Christmas tree and St. Nick are joining the ranks of pepperoni pizza and chicken chow mein.The latest entry to the delivery service boom, Woodstock Farm Nursery in Ellicott City, is offering countians the opportunity to shop at home from a selection of up to five trees delivered to the door."We thought that people don't have time to go out," said Alice Bender, 51, owner of the nursery.

Paul Bilger Jr., a retired nurseryman and former owner of Bilgers' Long Green Nurseries, died of gastric cancer Feb. 25 at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Lutherville resident was 78. Born in Baltimore, Mr. Bilger was raised near Lake Montebello. He was a 1948 graduate of Friends School and served in the Naval Reserves at Fort McHenry from 1948 to 1949. After being discharged from the reserves for medical reasons, he earned a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from the University of Maryland in 1952.