Frederick residents show off their green thumbs during Garden Tour
May 21—Visitors in bright T-shirts, hats and dresses meandered from home to home to take a look at residents' gardens for the annual Beyond the Gates Garden Tour on Sunday.
According to Celebrate Frederick's website, the annual tour of a selection of downtown homes' private gardens has been a tradition for more than 20 years, and it offers "the chance to explore the elegant, whimsical and inventive gardens nestled behind the gates of private Frederick homes each spring."
This year, Celebrate Frederick partnered with The Garden Club of Frederick to showcase 13 gardens in the city. And every garden had its own feel and acted almost like a window to who the homeowner was.
Casey McCagh's garden at her home on Kline Boulevard features the statue of the Roman goddess Venus wrapped in vines, a fern garden shaded by a maple tree and a bee bath, a bird bath filled with marbles for bees to rest on and drink water.
On her property, there are other small, more focused gardens, like a fairy garden decorated with rocks people drew on, a patch of zinnia and one section for pollinators, with red and yellow hot pokers jutting out of the dirt. The hummingbirds love the pokers, she said.
McCagh recently became a certified master gardener through the University of Maryland. Her garden is Bay-wise certified as well, meaning that all decisions in her garden, even down to what soil she uses, are made to help protect the Chesapeake Bay.
For example, she removed invasive plants in the garden and replaced them with native plants for the pollinators. She and her partner, Ted Lawson, had been working on revamping the backyard for seven years, and this was the first time they opened it to the public.
"I love it, I guess because, you know, part of that 'master gardener' is educating people," she said.
In Pat Lipps' garden, right next door to McCagh, it was like playing a game of "I Spy," looking for bird baths. She prefers perennials to annuals, but she has some annuals scattered about. She has patches of succulents and a vegetable garden, where she's trying her hand at green beans this year.
She also loves planting her flora in pots.
"I can move stuff and also it's easier on the knees," she said.
She also had a geodesic dome jungle gym in the middle of the lawn for her great-grandchildren to scale when they come over.
Dawson and Ali Nash were walking around Lipps' garden, looking at the various flowers and sitting on a little bench shaded by a tree. The couple is new to Frederick. Dawson was originally from Illinois while Ali is originally from Texas; they settled in Frederick as Dawson was stationed at Fort Detrick.
They were out looking at gardens to do something different. They aren't big gardening people, but they appreciated seeing the hard work others put into their gardens, they said.
"It's different from dinner, a regular date night," Ali said.
At Harriet Wise's home further down Kline Boulevard, Wise's friends Starr Myklebust and Gail Bradshaw were going around the pods of mini-gardens scattered on Wise's lawn. They chatted afterwards, discussing different flowers and plants.
Wise opened her garden for the Garden Tour once before, when she was living at Dill Avenue. At her new home, she had been working on the garden for the past four years. She liked her lay out of the mini-gardens, with each one being different. Wise said she loves to watch things grow, and how unique a garden can be.
"A different house produces a different garden and a different town produces a different garden," she said. "Sometimes you're influenced by who you marry, sometimes by who you know and all those things."
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