Down garden paths in old Georgetown

How to explain the mystique of the garden? It’s a tie to nature, a refuge from the world, a chance to coax a living thing toward the fullness of its beauty. It’s art, design and style statement rolled into one.

That may explain the popular appeal of the annual Georgetown Garden Tour, which lights up Mother’s Day weekend with a rare chance to view some of the best tended and most lavishly planted gardens in the District.

This year’s tour on Saturday, with all proceeds going to charity, is expected to draw around 1,000 visitors, as in past tours, say its Georgetown Garden Club sponsors.

The 2006 garden walk will feature nine gardens within a 10-block square around Christ Church Keith Hall at 31 and O streets Northwest, as well as a hotly contested tree-box competition, focusing on the many small patches of sidewalk growing space surrounding Georgetown trees.

Refreshments for tour-goers, as well as a gardener’s boutique, detailed garden descriptions and plant lists for most of the gardens will be available at Christ Church.

The tour will be held on one day only, with no rain date, says garden club President Lee Child.

“Serious gardeners don’t care if it rains — they’ll come anyway, to see all those plants,” she says.

Anyone who cannot make the tour and wants to view the gardening skills of garden club members, Ms. Child suggests, should stop by the Volta Park Habitat Garden behind the basketball courts at 33rd and 34th streets on Q Street Northwest. Created and maintained by garden club members, it is open to the public.

Club members “work hard to maintain that garden,” Ms. Child says. The Volta Park garden includes native plants that are at home in several different habitats. A sunny border with hardy perennials, and a shady woodland featuring columbines, are two habitats represented in the garden.

Hidden oases

The venerable tour is now in its 75th year, five of those under the guidance of the Georgetown Garden Club. It represents one of the rare opportunities that Washingtonians have to peek behind all those private brick walls just north of M Street and west of 25th Street to see what kind of lush green escapes can be produced in the city’s naturally acidic, claylike soils by a professional’s hand and big garden budgets.

“The gardeners who participate are very proud of their work and want to show off their plants,” says landscape designer William Morrow, who is opening up his own private Georgetown garden to the public for a second year in a row.

“It’s also a way to be part of the community,” Mr. Morrow says.

Michael Connors, who with his wife, Julia, owns one of the gardens on the tour, says that they are new to the Georgetown area and view participation “as a way to reach out to our new neighbors.”

In Georgetown, gardeners must work their designs around the natural hills and terraces that form the neighborhood and the abundant shade provided by centuries-old trees that grace the community. Many Georgetown gardeners also find themselves having to shoehorn a lot of plants into some very small urban spaces behind all those graceful Federal period townhouses, Mr. Morrow says.

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