Thanks, Garden Clubbers
May 16th, 2016
I’ve always had a lot of respect and appreciation for garden clubs, those grass-roots (flower-roots?) groups of mostly women who share my love of plants and effort to encourage people to get their hands dirty.
Penn-Cumberland garden clubber Francesca McNichol showing Harrisburg school kids the joy of gardening.
That’s why I was particularly flattered last week in Michigan when National Garden Clubs Inc. gave me the highest national achievement honor it bestows on a non-member – a 2016 Award of Excellence.
NGC President Sandra Robinson said the award goes to “exceptional individuals, organizations or institutions that foster the joy of gardening through environmental and civic responsibility, conservation and community beautification.”
Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. I found out after the fact that the honor secretly germinated with Karen Schwarzbauer, Joyce Wallen and the West Shore’s Penn Cumberland Garden Club. Thanks, ladies! I’m more than honored.
Although I’m not in a garden club, I’ve probably been to more garden-club meetings than a lot of garden clubbers – usually as a guest speaker.
I think I’ve done talks at every club in the region – sometimes multiple times. My college baseball buddies would shake their heads wondering what happened if they saw me these days in a room full of 50 or 60 ladies chatting about begonias.
Garden clubs often take on newsworthy community and educational projects, so I’ve written about many of them over the years, like the rain gardens that area clubbers built at the Harrisburg Area Civic Garden Center building near Linglestown and the spiffy community garden the Penn Cumberland Garden Club manages at Ames True Temper in Hampden Twp.
I remember well the first contact I made into the garden-club world back in the 1990s when I was a green-horn garden writer.
I was full-time with the Patriot-News at the time, and the paper was looking for reader-involvement ideas. I suggested a garden contest.
No way was I going to be on the hook for picking winners, though. We needed someone who knew what they were doing. So I called around and quickly came up with the name of Natalie Smith in Linglestown.
George, Joyce Wallen and the Award of Excellence.
Natalie was a certified flower-show judge, a long-time garden-club member, and was a statewide leader in training clubbers to be judges. You might say she was the queen bee of judging.
Natalie, who sadly died just last year, was more than willing to help. She pitched in and recruited expert judges to do both the application screening and the actual garden visits for the whole 19 years we ran the “How Does Your Garden Grow?” contest.
We all had many great times driving around central Pennsylvania, unearthing hidden garden gems that no one would’ve known were there without such a contest.
In those early years, Natalie and the judges helped me out by identifying the plants we were seeing. I probably drove them nuts asking, “What’s this one?” “What’s that one?” “What do you call that blue thing?”
Natalie and her fellow judges also gave me insights into what made one garden more special than another.
Little by little, I soaked it up until I started to know all of the plants and design intricacies myself.
Eventually, I ended up teaching budding garden-club designers and consultants through the Garden Club Federation of Pennsylvania’s Landscape Design School.
What an education I got from Natalie and those early horticultural mentors. To name a few: Ginny Suhring, Maxine Haynes, Betty Lewis, Charlotte Zerance, Peggy Waters, Leslie Sobel, Joan Lutz, Denise Carlson, Shirley Herbert, Sharon Brown and Susanna Reppert.
Again, thanks, ladies. I’m grateful. And I hope I’ve managed to pay forward your enthusiasm and expertise to many other gardeners.