Streeter: Every Baltimore garden is a small act of defiance

Owen Cooke loves living in Baltimore, but he knows outsiders’ less than flattering observations of the place as rundown and graffitied are true in some cases. He lives near Patterson Park, behind what he calls “a trash alley” with random cats and the occasional person with addiction shooting up.

But inside the privacy of his gate is a deliberate, lovingly created paradise of flowers, including a variety of 10-foot-tall black-eyed Susans that hosts of insects have made their home.

“You can look down the alley, and there’s this big mound of yellow flowers over the gate,” said Cooke, the lawn and garden coordinator at Ace Hardware in Canton. “It does add some beauty.”

City gardening, like city living in general, can be hard, particularly if you have a rooftop deck rather than a rolling lawn or, like me, a concrete patio instead of a plot. But there is something almost revolutionary and rebellious about turning one’s urban space into a green, flowering oasis.

I chose to move back to the city of my birth because of the promise of a historical, gorgeous, diverse space — it was what my child and I needed. I don’t have to live in the ’burbs to want a part of nature. I’m doing my part with my colorful concrete patio, painted with bright splashes of yellow and blue.

I don’t have a big yard with tropical plants like the one I had in Florida, but I have pots filled with chrysanthemums, hanging baskets of pansies, and Adirondack chairs and twinkle lights to enjoy them with. I’m making this mass of bricks and noise something beautiful, one pot at a time.

“Baltimore is such a unique place. There are little places here where nothing seems to grow and also places where there’s a lot going on,” said Chris Kelley, owner of Fells Point plant store Kelley Gardens. “People here are so encouraging. They decide they want to try it and figure out a way to do it.”

No revolution is easy, and Cooke contends container gardening — planting in pots and other above-ground vessels — is a more difficult proposition than just gardening in the ground. “Watering is harder; choosing your soil type is harder. Everything is amplified a bit,” he said.

That includes dealing with unwanted intruders. Just like my country-dwelling friends who run off deer that feast on their vegetables, city gardeners deal with much less cuddly creatures. “Definitely rats,” Kelley confirmed.

Travel nurse Sarah Webb, an Eastern Shore native who moved to Canton, planted basil and spearmint in her ground-floor yard to deter those long-tailed fiends. She’s considering planting tomatoes on her rooftop deck rather than in that yard “because I don’t think I’d eat anything [grown] on the bottom,” where the critters can get to it, she told me as she perused the greenery outside the Ace.

There are adjustments you deal with here, like say the likelihood that decorative gardening items go missing. I once witnessed drunk Fells Point revelers get into a fight with my friend’s neighbor, trampling the flowers in her tree box. All that work destroyed by random idiots.

Sometimes humans are not the only disrespectful garden creatures. “The cats like to use the pots as litter boxes, which is not great for the plants. It’s great for the cats but not for me,” Cooke said.

So you get creative, like putting non-dyed mulch around your pots that deters the rats and that cats don’t like digging through, and helps the soil retain moisture. Or buying larger pots to increase the dirt volume.

If it’s so hard, why do it? Maybe it’s therapeutic, as it is for Cooke. Maybe it’s the wonder of seeing things thrive in places you wouldn’t expect, as Kelley said. For me, it’s a way of shutting the world out and breathing in nature from behind the privacy of my patio. I can’t control a lot of things, but I can create my own private universe.

Cooke said he likes talking to potential clients of all skill levels about the space they’re working with, from how much room is available to the amount of sun and shade they get. “We want people to be successful.”

That’s a very Baltimore thing I’ve witnessed in my time here — connecting with those who choose to live in this complicated place and want to help each other make it better.

It’s been a busy year on my patio — what I call “The Veranda,” because I’ve always wanted to be the fancy sort with houses that have names. My climbing plants are flowering beautifully, but all my roses blew off their bushes and I’m freaked out they’re not budding.

“You just have to wait,” Kelley told me. “You have to be patient.” I guess anything that’s worth doing takes a little of that.

As for Cooke, he knows putting in the work to maintain a garden brings unexpected results, such as the family of praying mantises that came to stay on his flowers all last summer, or the five types of bees he saw there.

Last week, he spent most of his day off outside, communing with the flowers. There was a police helicopter hovering above the street, but it didn’t interrupt his reverie.

“Looking out back out into my alley, it’s nice to inject some beauty in that. Something about gardening really keeps me engaged. It gives you a different view of where I live,” Cooke said.

He’s just waiting for the day this summer when the drone of bees replaces the buzz of the police helicopter circling overhead.