Talk of Takoma • Howard Kohn October 2007 Mike Welsh’s greening outside the community center: Crape myrtles, rocks and “pray for rain”

Photos:Julie Wiatt

Mike Welsh holds on to a hold out

The Western Maryland rocks, wired to wooden pallets, arrived on a truck from a local quarry on an August afternoon. A deliveryman, operating a hydraulic arm, lowered them onto the sidewalks of Lower Maple Avenue. The pallets stayed there for several days. Mike Welsh, the City gardener, wasn’t too worried about theft even though big rocks are far more of a prized item these days than they were ten years ago when Mike was able to obtain several boulders for free during the Manor Circle job.

Those boulders, massive, suitable for ancient artisans, he had placed in a street garden to shut off traffic between the Circle and Ethan Allen Avenue. The ones he brought in for his latest project, smaller and stylishly irregular, had a slightly less obvious purpose.

Darryl Braithwaite, Mike’s boss at Public Works, had called him and said, “Now you do your thing.” This was after a construction crew had narrowed some of the Maple Avenue intersections by adding a jut of new cement curb and after another crew had dug in a row of new maple trees under specs from the City arborist, Todd Bolton.

In the early days of September Mike’s gardening crew went to work in the widened sections between the pedestrian walkways and the motorist lanes. They stripped off what was left of the grassy, weedy cover and hacked at the earth to create holes the size of manhole covers into which they stood up clumps of nearly mature crepe myrtles known as “Miami.” Then, with wire snips, they freed the rocks and shoved and tugged them into place on either side of the Miami myrtles and finished off the job with blackened, native mulch from the Public Works depot.

Voila! A pleasant, leafy foreground was superimposed on an urban street that struggles for relief from the overbearing nature of apartment towers and the naked architecture of the two-year-old community center.

“The community center, that’s the biggest challenge. We really need to soften the look,” Mike said on a recent morning, as he inspected the soil at the base of the myrtles for moisture. “It’s tough, very tough. There’s no shade, and when the sun beats down it’s probably the hottest, driest place in town. You have to pray for rain.”

For the grand opening of the center in 2005 Mike planted ornamental grasses and rug junipers in six fluted, earth-colored containers that he placed on the cement bridge leading to the front doors. Within a year the grasses and junipers had burned out. This summer he put in lantana, which prospered but is an annual that will die with the frost, along with full-sun hydrangeas, one of which has already succumbed despite hand watering.

Drought resistant lantana and yucca

At least three of the oak trees and silver bells planted last year as a future canopy for the center also are in doubtful condition, leaves browned, trunks suckering out, even though they were afforded the luxury of a wrap-around plastic bag filled regularly with water that leaks out slowly and surely through a valve.

Urban creatures have entered into competition for the water. Mike knelt at the base of one of the silver bells. The ground was imperviously dry. He lifted the plastic and pointed to the yellow valve, chewed off and dysfunctional. “Rats most likely, or squirrels,” he said.

He walked back to the myrtles, a bush-tree that has become a sort of trademark in Mike’s streetscapes around town. It’s a favorite because of its long flowering season, July through September, and its moderate height, short enough not to interfere with overhead wires, and because it is accustomed to the South. “Myrtles love the heat, and they tolerate drought.”

Next spring Mike intends to fill in around the myrtles with more species that have a botanical pedigree to bear up in the climate at the community center-- spireas, yuccas, daffodils and old-fashioned bearded irises.

As for the rocks, while they may help by trapping and holding rainwater, their essential purpose is to ward off errantly guided vehicles. “You’d be surprised how many people in SUVs, vans and pickups, heck, even regular cars, jump the curb,” he said. “If you don’t put in rocks for protection, everything you plant will take a beating.” A large commercial van approached as he spoke. He watched the driver turn into the parking lot at the center and bump the van’s rear wheel over the curb and into a planting zone.

Maria Sola: The death of a Good Samaritan

Maria Sola

Before ex-cop Maria Sola left town on September 18 to visit a bad-tempered ex-con in Philadelphia who had sweet-talked her in prison letters, calling her his “Papichula,” she asked her friend Karin Anderson to feed the five cats she had rescued from the alleys of Langley Park.

“That was Maria, the most considerate person in the world. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for others,” said Karin a few days later, after she heard that Maria had been killed.

Karin had a foreboding about the trip. Maria wouldn’t say who was waiting to see her, but Karin suspected it was the former pen pal, Hector Raul Ayala, paroled from prison this year after doing time for the murder of a colleague from the world of cocaine trafficking with whom he had an argument. At the urgings of a Christian group Maria corresponded with him for more than a year. The two hit it off in their letters, but when she saw him in person in April after his release he became irritated at something she said and punched her and destroyed her cellphone.

Karin had hoped the romance – “or whatever you call it” – was over and done, and so it seemed. All summer Maria, who had turned 44, kept to the routines of her life in Takoma Park, her job as a dental technician and her evening feedings of the feral cats that have formed a colony on the grounds of Washington Adventist Hospital. Maria told Karin and the other women who did cat duty with her that Hector Ayala’s sudden show of temper had frightened and unnerved her. She had even asked a Montgomery County judge for a restraining order to make him keep his distance.

At some point, though, Maria learned he had accepted counseling for anger management, and everyone knew how strongly she believed in second chances.
“By nature Maria was a rescuer. She felt this was her calling, whether it was people or animals,” said Karin, who, in the days following the shock of the news from Philadelphia, continued to keep tabs on the strays Maria had collected. Maria had built a shed for them behind the house on Trescott Avenue she was sharing with her parents, Pedro and Martha Sola, but now, with Maria gone, one of the cats, the oldest, wandered off each day to the house on Flower Avenue where she used to live, as if to find her there.

Maria’s bludgeoned body had been found by police on September 19 under a mattress in Hector Ayala’s bedroom after he came to their attention by slashing his wrist in apparent remorse and then admitting himself to a hospital. A bloodied hammer lay next to her body.

“This is tragic. We are devastated, my parents, me, all her friends,” said her brother, Peter Sola, on the morning of her memorial service at Our Lady of Sorrows in Takoma Park. “Everyone who knew her loved her.”

Stop, do not pass Go: Council to Metro board

On September 24, at their weekly session, the City Council tried again to ramp up the pressure on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to prevent the board from selling a plot of land at the Takoma Metro station for 85 townhouses with two-car garages. In a resolution agreed to unanimously the Council asked the Metro board not to sell point blank.
There has been long-running opposition to the townhouses project, which nonetheless continues to creep closer to the finish line. In a report published in August the Metro staff recommended the sale.
The primary objection raised by the Council and by numerous neighbors of the site is that the townhouses will overwhelm it, leaving little room for Metro riders who walk to the station, commuters who arrive by bus and those who use kiss-and-ride zones.
Congressman Chris Van Hollen also weighed in with a letter opposing the project in its current state.
At the September meeting Doug Barry, the Council member from Ward Six, offered to compromise. “Give us a proposal we can support,” he said, suggesting a smaller number of housing units without garages.
The Council has no official standing with the Metro board, however, and thus far the Metro board has exhibited little interest in negotiating with town leaders.

$20 million for radio station?
No deal

For the second time in less than a year Columbia Union College’s trustees have declined a controversial opportunity to pay off the Adventist school’s $5 million debt. On September 20, after receiving more than 1,700 e-mails from students and alums campaigning to save the college’s radio station, WGTS, the trustees reversed course and decided the station was not for sale.

Previously they had seemed ready to accept a bid of $20 million from American Public Media Group, which was planning to replace the Christian broadcasting on WGTS with secular public affairs.

Earlier this year the trustees rejected an offer from Washington Adventist Hospital, which occupies part of the same campus at Flower and Carroll Avenues, to buy some or all of the land owned by the college.

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