GameChangers
Doug Retzler Wants Hoe’s Hill Orchard to Flourish for Generations to Come
In his own words, the urban orchardist discusses the community impact of his green oasis—which is wedged into a residential neighborhood bordered by Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane.
Hoe’s Hill Orchard is a green oasis wedged into a residential neighborhood bordered by Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane, a small educational garden filled with edible plants—as well as a library fashioned from a hollowed-out tree trunk—started six years ago by Doug Retzler. Retzler, 69, launched the project as a way to green over a bleak patch of unused land next to a Baltimore City pocket park. Despite struggles with the Baltimore City Recreation and Parks office, Retzler’s orchard is flourishing, with the support of his neighbors and his community.
You know, it’s just an experiment. I wanted to canopy over this so it wasn’t just a dust bowl, and I thought, I can do it with fruit trees: Italian plum, McIntosh and Granny Smith apples, apricot, Greengage plum, loquat, Moonglow pear, bush cherries, spearmint, goji berries, black elderberries, mulberries, fennel, crabapples, and a hackberry, a rare tree native to Maryland. I’m playing with a lot of things I’ve never seen before or tasted before [that] I want to see, and then I want to have kids see.
I’d been working out in Leakin Park, and we’d bring buses of city kids out there. And they’d be scared because they’d never been in the woods, and they were afraid of everything. And you know, at the end of the day, after we’d been out there for three hours, we’d have them making things out of vines and stuff, making their own nature, art, hats. And they’d say, “Can we come back again?”
“This is your park. That’s why we want you to take care of it. So it will be here for you and your children and your children’s children.
It’s like, “This is your park. That’s why we want you to take care of it. So it will be here for you and your children and your children’s children.” That has always been the biggest thrill for me, because you just see a lightbulb going off in their heads and it’s like you’ve empowered them. I wanted this to be community-building. If we don’t introduce kids to nature now, then when they’re adults and have to vote on something, there’s going to be no stewardship.
And so it activated the orchard, because the only people who were using this park when I moved here were the dog-walkers. I’m proud of what I’ve done. And I’m so happy that it’s working. It’s a litmus test, you know, when the community takes over and I can pull away.
One of the reasons I started this is because of Charles Grandison Hoe, a Black gentleman who bought his way out of slavery and put in an orchard. Right where my house is was all fruit trees. It was in homage to that. And it’s a story I want to see told.