As long as I have lived in Baltimore, I had never been to Sherwood Gardens until recently. I was surprised to find that it is so close that I could walk to it. The area itself is really a large plot of open ground filled mostly with azaleas, trees of all types, and of course, the famous tulips. The look this year is overwhelmingly pink and white, but old newspaper and magazine articles from the Pratt library Maryland room tell of a much greater variety of colors in years past.
Mr. Sherwood, the originator of the garden, was actually quite welcoming to visitors considering that he began the gardens in the 1920s on his private property. He said that he wanted to plant a few plants to cover some bare spots and the garden spread out from there. Ultimately the garden became famous for the many tulips, azaleas and flowering trees. Planting the bulbs was a large undertaking. According to a Style magazine article, in 1937 Sherwood had 42,000 blooming tulips in his garden. Sherwood’s chief gardener, Clarence Hammond, would order the bulbs from Holland at the end of the summer and they were shipped over by boat. It took a month for Hammond and his crew to plant all of the bulbs. That was not the end of the work. Tulips can come back year after year, but they loose their strength and the blossoms become less showy. In spring, after the bulbs bloomed and the foliage died back, Hammond and his assistants would have to dig them up all over again. Now, Sherwood is a free, year round public park maintained by the Guilford Association. There were 80,000 tulips this year. Most of these were dug up and happily carried home during the annual tulip dig, which lets the public remove the spent bulbs for a very small fee.
Resources:
Guilford Association
Sherwood Gardens: cultivating a Baltimore tradition
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