Highwood Drive, Year Four
A young native garden was left largely to do its own thing during the fourth year, October 2024-2025, living on Baltimore’s Highwood Drive. Sorting through snapped images for this year’s photo essay served as a reminder of how much time since January 20th has been redirected into political activism. So pardon the weeds.
Here July coneflowers and spirea are in flower while the rounded aster and spiring Muhly grass will come into their own in late summer, early fall.
Click here to be taken to a photo essay capturing the Before-After continuum from lawn to water-harvesting native garden.
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Highwood Year Three
This photo essay charts roughly the third year of work on a new garden at Highwood Drive in north Baltimore. Carried out from October 2023 through October 2024, the work started with the removal of concrete paths and the resetting of permeable ones, then moved on to the excavation of drainage channels around a back yard structure. Emerging native perennials and trees planted previous years combined with a pocketful of annual wildflower seeds ensured that there were some good plants caught at good moments. Painting the garden gates was an autumn impulse. For explanatory notes, plant identifications, and information about sources, scroll down to the bottom of images and click on the titles. Accompanying photo essays may be found here for year one, and year two.
Aguadoc
Like water through rock, the news of Michael Campana’s death traveled slowly from where he died late last August, in his home city of Corvallis, Oregon, to where I now live, in Baltimore, Maryland. Top of the scroll in the December 2nd New Yorker, there was a quip of his that likened an RFK, Jr. scheme to save a river by bottling its water to “a church running a brothel.”
Pure Michael or, to use his water handle, pure “Aquadoc.” Long sober from Twitter, I searched Michael on the newly vibrant platform Bluesky to high five him. Look who’s in The New Yorker! No Aguadoc. Something was wrong. Amplifying good work on social media matters these days. It’s expected that working scientists be out doing “sci comm” on social media explaining their work and promoting their universities. Even before Twitter, Michael was all over it, and not just for himself, …
My friend Wally
Remembrance of Wally MatsuuraTo Maryland, with love
Some sites are easy to landscape, others aren’t. The job featured here wasn’t. Judge for yourself whether it was worth it by perusing this photo-essay of the conversion of a conventional garden to a wreath of Maryland’s native rudbeckias, lobelias, viburnums, junipers and asters. Those curious about plant identifications are encouraged to scroll beneath the pictures to the captions. For an all-out guide to gardening in the mid Atlantic, this resource directory, produced last spring for the Baltimore Banner, comes into its own again as fall affords an even more temperate window to establish new plantings.…
keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
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