Written By Cari Pierce
Released from beneath winter’s blanket of snow, spring’s bounty is now revealing itself. Throughout the area, yards and gardens are showing signs that spring has, indeed, sprung. The beauty we see in a daffodil’s bloom or in a dogwood’s bud isn’t just Mother Nature’s work. Green thumbs abound in Carroll County and the gardens are as diverse as they are outstanding.
From the interior French doors of her dining room, Mary Ellen Bay looks through the sun room on the back of her Uniontown home to her favorite garden view: a large, spring-fed pond that invites herons, kingfishers and dragonflies. Catching her eye in all directions are lush flame azalea bushes and pert clusters of daffodils. Above the garden, the delicate branches of her Judas trees canopy part of the yard with their vibrant pink blooms.
Obtaining an early introduction to rooting and planting from her mother and grandmother, Bay has been gardening for more than 60 years. As a professional landscape designer, an accredited flower show judge and a landscape design teacher, she has a deep investment in and appreciation for her hobby and her work. “[My garden] never looked really good until it was about 30 years old. You need maturity if you really want it to come together,” said Bay.
That maturity is evident in Bay’s voluptuous hostas, prime azaleas and grand trees. In her gardens, she cultivates many native plants, including a shade-loving ginger that acts as a picturesque groundcover with its big round leaves.
“I don’t grow a whole lot for the flower,” Bay said. “I really am working more toward heights – something tall and then coming down to medium heights and then something that’s lower in the same bed – so that you get the eye [moving] through the design. I’m more interested in that and the texture of what I plant rather than how many blooms I can get out of it.”
Spending a couple of hours early each morning working in her garden, Bay does not produce the effort for the benefit of passersby; rather, she said, “This whole garden was designed to be seen from inside the house, through any window in the house.”
For those who say they’ve never seen her in her garden, thats’s because, according to Bay, “They’re not up early enough. It’s marvelous. That’s when you hear all the birds, see all the insectsÉ [I] love people, but enjoy the solitude of my garden.” It is her personal environment, a place where she controls the view.
One group with whom she openly shares her garden is the Carroll Garden Club, federated in 1952, but organized in the county since the 1920s. Bay has been a member for 31 years. The club is part of The Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland and the National Garden Clubs.
Meeting monthly, club members encourage each other’s gardening efforts, share plants and materials, tour professional gardens and nurseries and participate actively in the community. Carroll Garden Club president, Jan Halman-Miller, joined the group, currently with 35 members, in 2002.
Halman-Miller explained that the club has entered a wreath in the Arts Council Festival of Wreaths, had a basket in the Silvery Moon Ball auction, participates in a junior garden club with Elmer Wolfe Elementary School and hosts activities with seniors at West End Place, in addition to maintaining a therapy garden at the facility.
After 37 years of teaching art in county schools, participation in the club has given Halman-Miller the gardening support she needed to turn her more than 20-year love affair with flowers and plants into a pursued passion upon retirement. “ÉI knew that I needed guidance, so I went to these garden club people and they give wonderful guidance,” she says.
What started out as a garden of easily divided sedum (a hardy succulent) and mums has blossomed into more for Halman-Miller. Her home near Taneytown offers a couple of acres to mow and plant. “I’m in the process still of putting it together,” she said. “I think [gardening is] very spiritual. I think you have to work hard.”
She is a self-proclaimed “monkey gardener,” i.e., monkey see, monkey do. “I look at other people’s gardens and say, Ôthat’s a beautiful plant,’ and I find one and put it in my garden,” say Halman-Miller. The rewards are in cultivating what she finds.
Halman-Miller eagerly awaits the first blossoms of clematis she planted last year and enjoys the shrub-like Harry Lauder “Walking Stick” tree that is a focal point from one window of her home.
“It’s very gnarled andÉ it’s got these very corkscrew kind of branchesÉ it does beautifully in Oriental arrangements,” she said. “That’s one of my favorites and it’s something I learned about in the garden club. I had no idea what that plant would do or how it looked.”
“You can learn an awful lot when you’re a member of a [garden] club,” said Joan Mann. She’s been gardening for over 25 years and admits that she likes to play in the dirt. The results of her soiled pruning gloves are evident in the shade garden she tends at her Westminster home.
“We have a lot of hostasÉ we have sedumsÉand of course, the bulbs in the spring,” said Mann. “A lot of our garden is evergreens.”
“I do [plant] some flowering things, but mainly it’s just green,” Mann said. Splashes of white, pink, orange and yellow – her favorite color – dance among the green and chartreuse hues of her plants and shrubs. Throughout her property, hostas abound – providing the backdrop to a small grouping of stacked stones in one bed and drawing the eye toward an old shed and its whimsical, mature purple wisteria in another.
Wisterias are her favorite plant. “They’re easy to take care of,” said Mann. “I like them bloomingÉ and, the different sizes, the different textures.” In particular, Mann likes the August Lily hosta for its fragrant white flower.
Like Bay, Mann has planned her garden for optimum viewing from inside her home – informally, yet deliberately, laying out her different planting beds. “It’s never really been a formal thing,” said Mann. “I have a friend who is a very good gardener and when I was first getting started, she gave me some suggestions and it just kind of grew.”
Admittedly, even these seasoned gardeners are still learning. “You like it; you don’t like it,” said Mann, “so, you move the plants or something’s died and you have to replace it. Gardening is ongoing, changing.”
Marjie Kimble is no stranger to continued learning in her gardening pursuits. She has been a gardener for all of her adult life. But when she moved to her Westminster home 12 years ago, her new property challenged what she knew of gardening. “I had to learn, very quickly, a new type of gardening,” said Kimble. “That was woodland gardening because, even though we took trees down, there was still not enough sunshine.”
She sought the help of a professional landscape architect, John Donofrio. Before he died, Donofrio worked with Kimble to define and lay down pathways, to design and build a recalculating two-pond water feature, joined by a stream, and to help her expand what she already knew about gardening.
“John taught me that in order to have a successful plant, you have to put a $3 plant in a $9 hole,” said Kimble . “This is what I do. When we put in a new garden, I completely replenish the soil to that I have a running start on itÉ That was one of the gems that he passed on to me.”
Kimble’s new beds start with good dirt, to which she adds peat, humus and a little fertilizer. Of all the glorious specimens of irises, tulips, daffodils, Japanese Maples, Coral Bells, rhododendrons, ferns, hostas and decorative grasses that flourish in the good soil of her garden, it is her day lilies that make her smile. They remind her of her dad, who she described as a “huge gardener.”
“I really love day lilies,” said Kimble. “I love each day when there are new blooms. I learned that from my father.” In fact, she learned much from her parents – the names of flowers, an appreciation of the beauty of flowers – as she grew up watching and learning from them as they worked their own garden beds.
Her parents would surely be proud of the how their daughter has layered her woodland garden with shades of green, touches of pinks, white and rosy hues, using perennials with added spots of annuals to keep colorful blooms in the garden through October.
Gardening from spring through fall may be daunting to some, but Kimble enjoys the release her garden affords her. “I have used [gardening] my entire life as a means of finding peace, finding quiet time, finding alone time and it’s just actually been a very spiritual thing for me,” she said.
“You can find good plants anywhere,” said Bay, adding that you just have to know a little about what will work for your garden, based on whether you have sun or shade and acid or alkaline soil.
Finding the various plant and flower varieties that experienced gardeners love to grow is not difficult, and professional assistance is readily available. Each professional has his or her favorite nurseries.
In the end, gardening seems to boil down to a matter of preference and level of commitment. “You can garden anywhere,” said Mann. For Halman-Miller, the next “anywhere” may just be the “little sheltered area in the back that really could be a microclimateÉ that’s what I keep thinking,” she says. “I’d like to put in pavers and it would becomeÉ kind of like a grotto feel. I’m still working on it,” she said. “If it happens, that’s wonderful. If it doesn’t, there’s lots of other work to do.”
