Tag: ecosystem

Announcing the Winners in the 2024 Native Garden Contest

Thirteen delightful native gardens, four winners!

Once again, members of the Native Garden Contest workgroup were amazed at the native gardens our neighbors are creating and caring for in the greater Towson community. This year, 13 gardens were submitted for our Native Garden Contest, and each one was filled with diverse native trees, shrubs and plants that created an oasis for pollinators and wildlife, and in many cases, addressed problems with storm water runoff.

Photos of some of the gardens entered into this year’s contest.

As we have in the past, we divided the gardens into four categories: Homegrown National Park® is for yards that approach or have exceeded 70% native plants, and also have made strides in reducing the lawn. Gaining Ground is for gardens where homeowners have been making significant progress to raise the percentage of native plants and still have room left to expand in the future. Breaking Ground is for new native plant gardens that may be fresh but are sure to make an impact! Seeds of Change is a category of special recognition for gardens that impact both the ecosystem and the greater community.  

Homegrown National Park®

Rujuta Narurkar and her husband, Rahul Bharadwaj, won the Homegrown National Park category for their gardens, which are designed to handle storm water in the property surrounding their Lutherville home. They received a grant from the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy and with their help, installed a backyard rain garden in 2021. Last fall, they installed a second garden in their deeply sloped front yard. This garden is designed to handle runoff during storms through a series of swales built of wood chips, which slow rainwater. Shopping at the local Kollar and Herring Run nurseries, they dug in attractive native plant species to absorb and filter pollutants.

The front yard is filled with flowering native plants, and three swales constructed of wood chips slow the flow of storm water to allow the garden to absorb as much rain as possible during storms.

Gaining Ground

Olivia Cumming and her husband, Eitan Stromberg, began their native plant journey when they transformed the “hellstrip” between the sidewalk and street three years ago. Now it waves with 2-foot-high Shenandoah switchgrass interspersed with New England asters. Next they removed more than half of the lawn and dug out non-native nandina, liriope and Japanese holly in front of the house, replacing them with native shrubs including clethra, viburnum, witch hazel and grey owl creeping juniper. A slow-growing tupelo (black gum) tree—planted as part of the GTA’s program with Bluewater Baltimore—and a mature American holly provide habitat for birds. Two curving stone pathways bisect the front yard, where Olivia estimates she has planted about 50 natives in the past 3 years. The front yard of their Anneslie home attracts pollinators as well as neighbors who see her well-designed beds – plus her new Bay Wise certification sign – and ask how they can get started with native plant gardening. 

Masses of flowering native plants and grasses now cover two thirds of the front yard.

Breaking Ground

Jane Anthon decided back in 2022 that she would no longer use pesticides or fertilizers in her Anneslie home, and in 2023 she began adding in native plants. Today, her backyard is home to a surprising diversity of native plants and shrubs, including brown-eyed Susan, chokeberry, hibiscus, winterberry, obedient plant, goldenrod, penstemon, cardinal flower, Joe Pye weed, coreopsis, coneflower, false indigo, and inkberry. She has several water features in her yard for the birds who share her yard. Because she frequently hosts family gatherings where children play ball and yard games, she’s keeping her back lawn for now, but continues to find native plants and tuck them into beds along the perimeter and in a few small beds she’s created in the center of her yard.

Swamp rose mallow and Brown eyed-Susans in front of the garden shed.

Seeds of Change

The native plants in the bioretention garden at St. Pius Catholic Church routinely attract wildlife. Even more impressive, however, is the unseen work going on beneath the black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, goldenrod, fleabane and swamp mallow blooming in the heat.  The garden filters stormwater from a half-acre parking lot, capturing pollutants like grease and oil from vehicles. The water slowly seeps into the ground rather than rushing into nearby Chinquapin Run, a tributary of Herring Run, and then on to the Chesapeake Bay. Constructed in 2016 with grants from Bluewater Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and designed by Cityscape Engineering, maintaining the bioretention garden (mainly weeding out thistles and other invasives) is a labor of love for the volunteers of the Social Action Ministry at St. Pius.

A view of a section of the bioretention garden at St. Pius, which can store than 20,000 gallons of water.

Special Recognition

Kay McConnell has gardened in her home near Lake Roland for more than 30 years and has learned to pay attention to how water and sun move across her wooded property to help her choose the native plants that now thrive there. She believes in repurposing materials, such as fallen tree logs and stones, and loves native grasses and ferns. She designed the native gardens at Friends School, and has helped many Towson-area gardeners start the process of designing native gardens in their own yards.

A hillside garden in spring.

To see all of the finalist gardens in the 2024 contest, please see our contest webpage at https://www.nativegardencontest.com/2024-contest

The use of Homegrown National Park® is used with permission from Homegrown National Park. Please check out this website and join a nationwide effort to restore our environment through sustainable garden practices in our own yards.
https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

A special thank you to all of the gardeners who have entered our contest over the years. We wish we could give each one of you an award for all of your hard work to create the beautiful and sustaining yards you maintain in our community.

Fewer Plastic Bags and Styrofoam Pieces, Hurray!  Green Towson Alliance helps with Stream Cleanups for the 9th year in a row

by Carol Newill

Literally tons and tons of trash have been collected at sites along the Herring Run and tributaries to the Jones Falls in the 9 years that Green Towson Alliance has been recruiting and helping community leaders and volunteers.

This spring, fewer plastic bags and less styrofoam than usual were found at several of the 9 stream cleanup sites. Clearly, recent laws meant to minimize such pollution are working!

However, 136 bags of trash have been removed from 9 stream sites so far this spring. Sadly, most was plastic bottles and other plastics, as well as some cloth and metal items and 2 local street signs.

Towson University students with trash they pulled from the stream.

Where did all that trash come from? As our storms become more extreme, more of the trash from our streets and parking lots washes into the storm drains and then into the streams!

Girl Scouts pulling trash out of a tributary of the Herring Run tributary.

Volunteer participation has been terrific, as 198 adults and 33 children participated in the cleanups this spring so far. 17 Girl Scouts from Troops #1152, #04151and #02294 cleaned a long stretch of stream and its wide ravine. 78 Towson University students from Impact TU Day and many children from a variety of Towson-area schools accompanied their parents at other sites. County Councilmember Mike Ertel helped at several locations, too.

Baltimore County Councilman Mike Ertel working with neighbors to clean this Towson stream.

Teams at 4 sites removed not only trash but also invasive plants, ranging from English Ivy and Porcelainberry vines to garlic mustard and prickly multiflora rosa.

A volunteer clips invasive porcelain berry vines from a streamside tree.

We thank all the volunteers and especially their Site Leaders:  Christine Horel Accardo, Anne Estes, Adreon Hubbard, Berni Kroll, Barbara Lewis, Janice Millard, Beth Miller, Lilly Richardson, Holly Sebastian, Bob Simon, Mike Stopford, Diane Topper.

Baltimore County Council Chair Izzy Patoka with volunteers at a stream cleanup which hauled trash and a massive logjam out of the Roland Run stream in Ruxton.

Two more sites are scheduled for cleanup next month, in Wiltondale and in Fellowship Forest. To help on a weekend morning soon, contact GTA at https://greentowsonalliance.org/contact/

164 Volunteers Cleaned Out More than a Ton of Trash from Towson Streams this Spring

Volunteers from neighborhoods all over Towson helped to clean up 2,857 pounds of trash from tributaries of the Herring Run and Roland Run this spring as part of Project Clean Stream for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. Every year, Green Towson Alliance organizes these cleanups in Towson, and this year, nine cleanups were held in April.

These youngsters helped look for trash in the Herring Run stream in Overlook Park.
GTA members Kathleen Brady (pictured) and Diane Topper led the Wiltondale Garden Club cleanup in the Wiltondale Community.

Some unusual items pulled out of streams include a street sign, a wet vac, a lampshade, a skateboard ramp, a tire from a wheelbarrow, and a dollar bill.

Volunteers Jason and Wayne Prem found this skateboard ramp in Roland Run.

One of the cleanups concentrated on removing invasive plants from the area around the stream in their neighborhood; many volunteers taking part on the cleanups couldn’t pass by invasive plants like garlic mustard, which is easy to spot and pull, and can be found just about everywhere in the spring in Maryland.

Some of the invasive garlic mustard pulled up at Overlook Park.

Students from Towson University participated in five of the cleanups, as part of the yearly TU “big event” on April 30, in which students go into neighborhoods to help with community projects.

Members of the Towson University Gymnastics Team pitched in at Radebaugh Park and its surrounding neighborhood.
TU students from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity with the trash they pulled out of the
Roland Run stream in Riderwood.

Since its inception in 2015, Green Towson Alliance volunteers have cleaned out nearly 16 tons of trash from local streams through these annual stream clean-ups. One big change is that we no longer find Styrofoam; its use as carryout containers was banned in Maryland in October, 2020. GTA member Lauren Stranahan coordinated this year’s stream clean-ups.

Some volunteers came equipped with boots and waders.

BEFORE YOU BUILD, THINK ABOUT YOUR TREES!

Planning a construction project at your house? First, consider your trees. They provide you with beauty, shade, and higher property value, so try to plan around them if you can. Design your new room with a view of your tree and the bird house or the feeder and the squirrel’s acrobatics, and the ever-changing display of leaves and branches throughout the season.

To preserve the trees you already have, protect the roots. Tree roots can be damaged easily in the process of home renovation. Weakened roots can lead to slow death for the tree that can take 1 to 5 years to become evident.

If grading your property is necessary for the project, bring in a tree expert before you begin to move dirt. The roots are close to the surface; about 80 per cent of the roots lie less than 24 inches deep. Roots can be buried too deep or destroyed in the process of grading.

Keep heavy items OFF THE ROOTS. Vehicles and supplies can crush the soil, the roots, and the mycelial structures underground that are essential to tree health.

How to do this? Mark out the “critical rootzones” of your trees, and protect the roots inside the zone. This is an invisible circle that runs just outside the drip line of the tree (just inside the edge of the canopy of the tree.) Directions for how to measure this circle are here.

Put a barrier, such as orange construction fence, around the critical root zone to keep off any vehicle, supplies, or other items. Instruct the crew chief that you want to critical root zone protected. If workers must walk or carry equipment over the critical root zone, it should be covered with planks for plywood to minimize crushng or compacting the tree roots.

Water the tree, 20 gallons slowly every week during the growing season to support its health during construction! Apply 3 inches of mulch over the critical root zone, too, to both retain the moisture and indicate that this area is to be protected.

If, despite all precautions, you notice dead sections or branches in an otherwise healthy tree, this can be a sign of root damage. The dead limbs will need to be pruned out to give the tree the best chance to flourish.

Trees add enormous value to our homes and our community. It is wise to plan ahead to ensure that your tree will survive any construction or renovation coming its way.

This article was written by Nancy Colvin and Carol Newill for Stoneleigh’s Greening & Recycling Committee, and published in the Winter 2023 issue of the Stoneleighite.

Mature oak tree next to a home.
A mature tree is truly a thing of beauty and adds so much
to a home, a neighborhood, and our communities’ ecosystem.