Joanne Buritsch’s Whimsically Serious Garden

The first impression when you pull into the Buritshes’ driveway just outside St Michaels is: A serious gardener lives here. Everywhere you look, there are gardens. Raised beds and an array of potted plants create a kind of mini-Secret Garden on one side of the drive. A long bed with a riot of blooms runs along the garage. An in-ground pond and water feature, moved from their western shore home seventeen years ago, helps to separate part what’s left of the front lawn from a gently curving alleyway filled with hosta mahonia, angel wings begonia and more along a wider bed leading to the ‘tropical garden,’ which boasts not one but two banana trees. Out back, where the waters of San Domingo Creek lap along the property’s 110-foot shoreline, there is a swathe of native plants that hold the bank together and create an ecosystem for the native critters.

Indeed, Joanne Buritsch is a serious gardener. In fact, she is a certified Bay Wise, University of Maryland Master Gardener, which means she always gardens with an eye to protecting the Bay and providing food and shelter for wildlife.

“I’m trying to take out all the grass so wildlife will have a variety to choose from,” she says. To that end, she also battles the invasive plants that can turn ecosystems into unproductive monocultures. In particular, she regularly beats back the North Sea Oats and the invasive phragmites that threaten to re-engulf the shoreline. (Phragmite austalis is the invasive variety you see everywhere; we have a native variety that has for the most part been smothered by the invaders.).

“When you get rid of the phragmites, the native plants often come back on their own,” Joanne says. “There are some native spartinas coming up here and one variety whose roots, I’ve been told, go down 20 feet so they really hold onto the bank. And here’s the Black Needle Rush,” she continues, bending down to run a hand along the upright porcupine-quills of a Juncus roemerianus plant.  “Environmental Concern comes here every year to harvest their seed.”

She’s also planted Little Blue Stem (Schizachyrium scoparium), a native ornamental grass that is good forage for small birds, and Goldenrod (Solidago).

“I mix the natives in everywhere,” she says. As a result, there are plenty of the birds that populate the property. “People can do a lot to help. Many just don’t realize what they need to know to work well with the environment.”

Yet, despite Joanne’s seriousness – and her apparent indefatigability to judge by the sheer volume of stuff on the property — there is plenty of whimsy, too.

“I’m a plant collector,” she confesses with a mischievous grin. She has taken home one of almost everything she’s run across. She also has ‘follies,’ fanciful garden elements like the mock-Roman columns she salvaged that delineate a casual half-circle on one side of the property, and the ‘fireplace garden’ she created by sticking an old wooden mantlepiece into a raised bed and planting crimson and russet-leafed plants beneath to represent the fire.

“Those cannas were supposed to be the ones with the red leaves,” she says, looking at a stand of Kelly green foliage at the back of the ‘firebox.’ “I’ll change them next year.”

Though the property is just under an acre, it looks and feels bigger because of the various ‘rooms’ and special spaces that Joanne has created.  Behind the garage, she has a space that looks like a four-poster bed in which she has planted some tomatoes and a pepper or two in addition to some things people have given her that she doesn’t have room for, and things she’s rooting for friends. On a corner just outside the bed is a large upright bag of organic potting soil that has a robust-looking tomato growing out of the top.

“It’s an experiment,” she says. “This is what the watermen are said to do – just plant a tomato into a bag of soil so they don’t have to worry with it as much. I put that tomato in the same day as that other one,” she says, pointing to the shorter tomato plant in the four-poster garden. “This one’s definitely bigger.”

It’s obviously lots of work –despite the careful mulching, the weeding alone must take the better part of two days every week. But Joanne loves it; she particularly loves the perpetual motion of the garden and the landscape itself.

“Something is always changing,” she observes.  “Things grow up and make more shade so you need to adapt the space. Or a tree or big limb will come down and create a sunny new space for a garden.”

Ultimately, the time and effort she spends here and as a volunteer with the Master Gardeners is all about how much there is to learn. Personal growth, which is why she wanted to share her gorgeous spaces with others in her gardening group.

“Gardening is so educational,” she says.  “For me and for everyone else.”

The Woman’s Club of Saint Michaels garden group used this members-only third annual event to raise money for the landscaping fund at the club on St. Mary’s Square in Saint Michaels, I was an invited crasher.