Virtual Flower and Garden Tour of Better Waverly

According to my math, this year marks the 42nd Charles Village Garden Walk taking place on Sunday June 5. I have calculated this based on my copy — kindly given to me by Sandy Sparks — of  A Spring Walk in Charles Village. Dated May 17, 1981 it notes, "For the twelfth year we welcome you into our homes and gardens. We hope to show you a pleasing contrast between the antique and the contemporary."

For more about this year's event, visit www.charlesvillagefestival.com or simply stop by the festival that day to purchase a ticket which provides you with a walking tour guide and map.

I love taking their tours and photographing the gardens as I walk along; but this entry is about Better Waverly, where I proudly live and walk around taking pictures of things in bloom. Because Better Waverly is not having an actual tour, I thought I would go ahead and create a virtual one.

Please be sure to visit the photographs so you can see how pretty things are here in my neighborhood, where many folks proudly grow and plant, including urban homesteaders and artists who have taken back neglected spaces and turned them into vital public places, like Homestead Harvest and Tinges Commons.

You can read more about them at http://betterwaverly.org.

To end back once again where we began, paraphrasing The Four Quartets  where we remember going through the garden gate, here is another poet - Waverly born and bred - whose poem here was published in her 1931 book, The York Road, about the Victorian Village that was Waverly after The Civil War.  

                                                          For a Waverly Garden

Send down, Great Gardener, 

To this dear plot,

Your cherubim, your seraphim;

Delay it not.

From sleet, from rotting drought,

Defend;

The arrowed rain, the sun

In plenty send.

At cool of evening then,

Toil done, and glare, and din,

Come down, Great Gardener,

And walk therein.