Think again, hon. The Baltimore holiday garden is set up indoors, not out, and doesn't even involve plants, except for the Christmas tree around which it's clustered. Model trains are usually involved. Almost invariably you will find a Nativity scene, although some traditionalists believe train gardens have become too secular and remove the creche, relocating it to a place of honor elsewhere in the room. More than two centuries ago, German immigrants brought the practice to Maryland and Pennsylvania, where it gradually evolved into the elaborate Christmas gardens of recent memory.
People here appear to have become so fascinated by mechanical gadgets .
In my childhood in Baltimore and the nearby suburbs, most of the families I knew had Christmas gardens. For a few years, my grandparents were some of those people. There was a church with stained-glass windows that lit up while music played, an incredibly detailed Esso station with uniformed attendant, and a lumberyard where the trains would stop so that a miniature crane could load Lincoln Logs onto its flatbed cars. Our Christmas garden, like most of that era, was a homegrown affair, cobbled together with glue, paint, and tissue paper on top of cardboard and balsa wood. Pop, as we called my grandfather, made some of the buildings and did all of the layout and landscaping.