We’ve been known to hurl
We got to thinking about these clubs after reading staff writer Nicola Smith’s report earlier this week about the Hanover Garden Club, which celebrates its 80th anniversary today by holding a plant sale at the club’s greenhouse off Route 10 behind Pine Knoll Cemetery. The proceeds will help the club continue to maintain the town’s 12 public gardens, which so enhance town streets, curbsides and frontages. At the moment, tulips in jewel-like colors are in full bloom outside Town Hall, the Co-op and the library, joyful displays of the club’s work.
Garden clubs may seem like throwbacks to an earlier era, but many are still-thriving institutions with a long lineage. America’s first garden club was founded in 1891 in Athens, Ga., according to National Garden Clubs Inc., and the idea took off across the country. The national group claims 5,000 member clubs and 175,000 individual members. We note that the Hanover Garden Club boasts 225 members, which is almost twice the number of people who showed up for Town Meeting last week. Maybe the Hanover Selectboard should stage a flower show on Town Meeting Day to attract more voters.
But we digress. Garden Clubs tend to have stalwarts, devoted volunteers who love to get their hands dirty in pursuit of beauty. Beautification, however, isn’t the only aim. Garden clubs also promote civic pride, environmental responsibility and conservation of the green spaces that soften the hard asphalt edges in towns and cities. In many areas of the country, garden clubs help to raise awareness of environmental challenges, such as the demise of pollinators and falling frog populations.
The virtue of garden clubs was once better understood, or so we infer from an article we happened to come across in The American City journal of 1917. Garden clubs were formed not only to “bring a sense of art into the street,” according to the author of “What a City Garden Club May Do,” but also to set a good example for home gardeners just as the American garden movement was getting underway.
The true purpose of a garden club “is to create a better understanding of what landscape gardening stands for,” asserts one Arthur H. Helder, a landscape architect, who goes on to point out that “one’s conception of what constitutes beauty and harmony is often jarred by pictures of so-called gardening.”
Practitioners of “so-called gardening” ourselves, we get the gist. Garden clubs are there to point the way, to illustrate how summer bedding plants are supposed to look, for example, and to spotlight the preferred arrangements of trees, shrubs and flowers. According to Helder, garden clubs will have performed their civic duty if they manage nothing more than checking the “popularity of odd and grotesque plants that introduce extraneous and jarring effects.”
So now we know. Garden clubs have not only aesthetic motives but didactic ones, to teach the rest of us how to behave when the daffodils die back and the bloom is off the rose.