Mount Vernon Flower Mart returns, Baltimore's oldest free festival blooms again

Flower Mart brought Mount Vernon back to life with the mix Baltimore knows best: rows of plant vendors, craft makers, food stalls and the lemon sticks that signal spring for generations of city residents. The festival, described as Baltimore’s oldest free festival, returned to the neighborhood with a weekend schedule that ran Friday until 8 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., giving people a narrow window to fill the plazas, sidewalks and shaded edges around Mount Vernon Place.

The event’s staying power reaches back to 1911, when the Women’s Civic League founded Flower Mart as part of its push for better living conditions in Baltimore. The original goal was practical and civic-minded, to encourage flower, plant and vegetable gardening in yards and vacant lots. More than a century later, that purpose still shows up in the bags of seedlings, hanging baskets and flats carried home by shoppers who came to improve their properties as much as to mark the season.

Mount Vernon Place Conservancy now sponsors Flower Mart along with Monument Lighting, keeping the festival tied to stewardship of one of the city’s most recognizable civic landscapes. Mount Vernon Place sits at the center of a National Historic Landmark District, and the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church provided the familiar backdrop that helps make the festival feel inseparable from the neighborhood itself. Near the Washington Monument, the event once again turned the area into a walking, browsing, buying circuit that drew families, neighbors and out-of-town visitors alike.

WMAR reported nearly 70 vendors at the 2025 festival, a scale that helps explain why Flower Mart still matters economically as well as culturally. A day that starts with flowers often ends with purchases that spread money across the neighborhood, from vendors inside the festival to nearby businesses that benefit when foot traffic spills out onto surrounding streets. One attendee said the family had come on a beautiful day to buy flowers and improve the look of their home, a small detail that captures Flower Mart’s appeal: it is part street fair, part garden market and part annual reminder that Baltimore still gathers around places it loves.