A ‘paradise’ amid the rocks and weeds

But Walker Marsh looked at the Broadway East neighborhood and saw possibility. Marsh, 28, has created a flower farm that is an oasis of neighborhood beauty, put teen-agers to work and holds out the promise of becoming an engine of economic opportunity.

“People look at a neighborhood like this, and they don’t see much in the way of hope,” Marsh said while watering hundreds of plants at the half-acre site of Tha Flower Factory. “I’m hoping this shows there’s a lot that can be done with the resources we have.”

Marsh, a soft-spoken former Cylburn Arboretum horticultural assistant, got the idea for the business while working at Real Food Farm in Clifton Park, a produce farm operated by Civic Works, an urban service nonprofit.

He created Tha Flower Factory with the help of a $63,8000 grant he won in Baltimore’s annual Growing Green Design Competition in 2014, part of the mayor’s campaign to transform vacant lots.

He has been selling flowers for several months now – Marsh names a café, a floral design studio, and a variety of neighbors as clients – and he hired nine teens as workers this summer through Common Ground, a pilot program for youth offered by the nonprofit Community Conferencing Center.

Positive effects seem to be taking root, and neighbors have noticed.

As he watered his bright yellow sunflowers, purple salvia, pink phlox, and red day lilies – not to mention the smattering of cabbage, peppers and tomatoes he grows and shares with neighbors for free – passing motorists honked encouragement and passers-by stopped to chat.

Andre Matthews, a frequent visitor to his daughter’s home across Gay Street, came over to visit his new friend, who lives a few miles away in Waverly.

Matthews called Marsh’s creation “a paradise in the jungle.”

“I remember when this neighborhood wasn’t nothing – just abandoned buildings, then after those were torn down, nothing but weeds and bricks and rocks,” he said. “Marsh brought it back to life.”

The farmer laughed and kept at his work.