Spring blooms at Sherwood Gardens through the years
Sherwood Gardens dates to the mid-1920s, when John W. Sherwood and his wife, Mary Franklin, began planting flower beds with cuttings of boxwoods and other specimens they had collected from the neglected gardens of Colonial estates in Southern Maryland, to fill in bare spots they could see from the house. On a May day in 1930, Sherwood stepped off his back porch and found himself surrounded by hundreds of people. “They were all strangers and they were wandering all over his Guilford estate looking at his flowers,” said a 1957 article in The Sunday Sun Magazine. Since then, blooms at Sherwood Gardens have been a Baltimore tradition.
Today, the Guilford Association, which plants approximately 80,000 bulbs, still maintains Sherwood’s tradition of digging up this season’s bulbs and replacing them. Typically peak bloom occurs the last week of April through the first week in May depending on weather conditions, according the Guilford Association.