In 1939 my grandparents, Earl and Cordelia (Delie) Warnock, married and purchased a small post-war cape cod in the D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. The home was typical of the era – a modest 2-bedroom brick home with little panache, but much promise for the future. The house sat on a on a flat grassy […]
More than 75 residents, neighbors, and friends gathered at City Hall in Bowie, Maryland in December of 2016 to celebrate the community’s seven year journey to become a Certified Community Wildlife Habitat under the National Wildlife Federation’s (NWF) Garden for Wildlife program. The excitement in the room was palpable as Bowie was awarded its certification […]
He came early in the morning on Saint Patrick’s Day 2015 and knocked over my hive boxes in search of his favorite foods—honey and bees. The 400-600 pound male bear had been making the rounds through the town of Poolesville and surrounding farms, finding fodder in bird feeders and tasty dogfood in open garages, until […]
The A+ Garden Centre is a community-supported and student-operated garden center located at Parkside High School in Salisbury, Maryland. The A+ Garden Centre is the largest high school garden center enterprise in United States. The Parkside Horticulture students grow and promote over 150,000 plants each year. The A+ Garden Centre is home to the All-America […]
Sarah Hedean is the Living Collections Manager at Smithsonian Gardens. I sat down to talk with her on August 9, 2017 about bluebird nesting boxes at the Smithsonian Gardens greenhouses. For part one of our interview, on the subject of her career, the field of horticulture and some of her current undertakings with Smithsonian Gardens, […]
Woodend Sanctuary is a 40 acre property in Chevy Chase, Maryland, bequeathed to and now headquarters of the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Mid-Atlantic States. The mission of the Audubon Naturalist Society is to inspire residents of the greater Washington, DC, region to appreciate, understand, and protect their natural environment through outdoor experiences, education, and […]
Although my Granddaddy passed away about a year ago, I wanted to share the story of his commitment to farming the way he was raised. Granddaddy grew up on this very farm around the turn of the twentieth century growing row crops as is so common on the Eastern Shore. Although farming was not his […]
“The Hill” is a steep, woodland slope at the corner of Nelson Street and College Parkway in Rockville, Maryland. The Garden Club of College Gardens (GCCG) has landscaped and maintained a garden there since the 1970s. The Club is part of the National Capital Area Garden Clubs, Inc. and draws its approximately fifty-three members from […]
I was a very little girl during the early 1940s and our country was at war. There were air raid drills and black-out curtains and black outs. People bought War Bonds to show their patriotism. I remember rationing of gasoline and sugar and other things. So many things were needed for the war effort. Fresh […]
This year I grew cucumbers in my backyard garden. I put in three slicing cucumber plants and three pickling cucumbers. I found that it can be easy to miss seeing the lighter-colored pickling cukes sometimes so a few of them got quite fat! Picking was my solution for the abundant crop (including the fat ones). […]
The Berwyn Heights Community Garden Planning Committee (Planning Committee) is an outgrowth of the Berwyn Heights Green Team (Green Team) in Berwyn Heights, a town of approximately 3,123 residents in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In 2012, the Town Council established the Green Team to help the municipality become “Sustainable Maryland Certified” (SMC), and support activities […]
My parents were married in my grandparents’ backyard in Darnestown, Maryland on June 2, 1973. I grew up looking at the photos in their wedding album and obsessing over the 70’s fashion on view in their Super 8 wedding film. It was a true hippie, bohemian wedding, very modern at the time, and very them. […]
Sunflower Village, a community garden in the Franklin Square neighborhood of Baltimore, has been growing strong since 2010, when the Franklin Square Community Association decided to take over a large abandoned lot. Several years before, five houses stood where the Sunflower Village now resides. When they were torn down, all that remained was the neglected […]
In 1966 Capitol Car Distributors, a Volkswagen distributing company, unveiled its new headquarters in Lanham, Maryland to much fanfare. At the time, the company managed over fifty-eight Volkswagen dealerships in the Mid-Atlantic region. Situated on thirty-three acres of land east of the Capital Beltway, the luxurious, 150,000 square-foot complex was designed by Mills, Petticord & […]
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me,” with prizes for the best stories ranging from […]