His new goal is to remove the invasive vines from around the thorny berry shrubs that provide food and protected shelter for birds. He is hoping he can hire some goats to do the job.

He needs more than a few goats. Some of his neighbors pitch in on Earth Day, too. But he needs them year round.

"It is pretty well planted now," said Waldman, a student of, and a believer in, public green spaces and what they do for communities.

"What it needs is maintenance. But this is the problem you have with all 'commons' — the ocean, the bay, the green spaces. Whose job is it to take care of it?"

Waldman hopes that he can "subdivide" the park into parcels and get five or six neighbors to volunteer to take care of that small portion.

"This thing can't be the crusade of one crazy guy," he said.

Poplar Park is Waldman's contentment. You can tell he is happy when he wades into it with his over-size cart and his gardening fork and emerges with a mountain of debris. But it is slowly breaking his heart, too.

When the Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad laid down the tracks so long ago, they probably used an herbicide commonly known as "Spike." It appears to have collected in the depressions where the tracks were laid, and because it has "a half-life of forever," he said, it is killing his trees.

The tree he planted for his daughter Susannah's first Christmas more than 20 years ago died when the tree's roots finally found their way into the track bed, and the poison. There is nothing he can do but plant more trees.

Waldman had a vision two decades ago: Plant trees to make it look like a park and it will become a park.

He was right, because that's exactly what happened.

Editor's note: The writer lives in the same Annapolis neighborhood as Robert Waldman and has watched his Poplar Park gardens grow for many years. She now feels like she needs to be one of the people who volunteers to care for a small part of it.

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