Transcript
My name is Brent Figlestahler, but here I’m known as Fig, and my title is Head Gardener for the Cylburn Arboretum Friends.
We’re here at Cylburn Arboretum. We partner with Baltimore City to help steward this treasure of a place.
An arboretum is a collection of woody plants, so woody trees, shrubs, and vines, and we have about 2,700 plants in our database. Each of our trees is accessioned, so that means it’s both tagged and tracked and we know where it came from and when it was planted.
In about the 1980s, Cylburn Arboretum designed five gardens that were to demonstrate what people could do in their own city backyards—in particular, in smaller row home gardens. A lot has changed since the ’80s, and what we’re trying to do now is kind of reinvent those gardens, both culturally and also kind of to today’s standards in garden design and maintenance.
We’re redesigning the five spaces in conjunction with local contractors, local design teams of landscape architects and garden designers. There are garden clubs sponsoring this as well, and then we’re also partnering with folks like you all at Second Chance, local nurseries.
Collectively, we’re trying to kind of reinvigorate what it means to garden in Baltimore City, and demonstrate unique takes on how to design within a small space. So some of the unique challenges to gardening within Baltimore are things like concrete. Many of us have concrete pads for backyards. The spaces are tight. They’re usually more deep and narrowthan rectangular. There are challenges with lighting. We believe that everyone has a need to be outdoors in a safe, inclusive space.
We reached out to Second Chance in hopes of garnering support through materials. Our dream is that each of these gardens is tangible and realizable for your average Baltimore City resident. Places like Second Chance are treasures within the city that are accessible to all of us. Ideally, the model of reuse employed by Second Chance is akin to what we’re doing here, and we’d like to encourage any city resident to come here, see what they could do with material that might need a new home that could be reused, that they might have on hand, or that they could find at some place like Second Chance.
Here at the Arboretum, our business is horticulture. It is green space. It is connecting people to that resource that, here at least, we believe we all need in our lives. We can be a destination for that, and I think we are, I hope we are, for the city. But our dream is also that by visiting this place, you take something home with you, whether that’s an experience in one of our programs, whether that’s a newfound appreciation for daffodil blooms, which are prevalent this time of year, or whether it’s just peace of mind and an escape from one’s day.
So Second Chance has been great throughout this process. It’s just an amazing repository of really cool stuff. We took the design teams down with us for a visit, and I think in seeing what’s there, a lot of these designs morph in ways that, you know, may utilize some of that material. The donation of the materials has helped make this project achievable. One of our goals at the onset was that these projects are realizable by the average person on an average income, that nothing we’re demonstrating should be too far out of reach for someone. Places like Second Chance make that even more realizable.
Baltimore City’s Horticulture Division of Rec and Parks is based here, and they’ve helped design these. They’ve helped with materials. A lot of the material that didn’t come from Second Chance came from someone’s good insight in the past to save things—sidewalks within the city, iron gates around Druid Hill Park, you name it. A lot of things have been kind of cherry-picked from throughout the city, and they’re kind of reborn here, which is pretty special. It’s really been kind of a group effort between the Friends group and Baltimore City Horticulture Division.
You know, we refer to ourselves as a hidden gem. We’d love to be less hidden to everyone in Baltimore. It’s a beautiful resource for the city that we tirelessly care for, because we’re here for everyone.
