In praise of garden clubs

Jill Severn portrait

The Friendly Flowers Garden Club was established in what is now Lacey in 1945. At its meeting and flower show a week ago, well over 75 people – nearly all older white women – turned out at the Thurston County fairgrounds. The occasion was definitely a friendly gathering of women and flowers.

The featured speaker was an expert on heucheras (also known as coral bells), a group of popular perennials native to North America. Some have red leaves, others green or chartreuse; they are easygoing, versatile and thrive in both pots and flowerbeds.

Over a simple, efficiently served lunch made by club members, heucheras were a continuing topic of conversation. Some members had grown them, others had scarcely heard of them. It was nice to see that membership in this club depended on affection for gardening, not expertise or botanical mastery.

Membership in this club also features deep and often very long-lasting friendships. Two women seated near me had gone to high school together. And as another noted, many of these women did not work outside the home when their children were growing up, so their schedules were both more flexible and more oriented to their homes and gardens.

Today, the Friendly Flowers Garden Club has a succession challenge: With scarcely any younger people in attendance, what will become of it?

Another old-school local garden club, The Olympia Rose Society, has already aged out of existence. Now, the Centennial Rose Garden it nurtured for many decades is tended by staff of the Schmidt Mansion in Tumwater, on whose grounds it is located.

We hope the Friendly Flowers Garden Club can avoid this fate. It has and still does contribute a lot of value to this community, and its members.

Back in the day, clubs like this one provided a way for women to learn skills essential to living in a democratic society. They learned how to run meetings, how to resolve disputes with one another, how to work collaboratively and how to organize events and get things done. In this respect, they put Congress to shame. One wonders whether longstanding membership in a garden club ought to be a prerequisite for running for political office.

Those skills also helped this generation of women succeed in the workplace as opportunities opened up.

Members also learned aesthetic skills both in their gardens and in the flower shows where they competed with one another in flower arranging and other artistic uses of flowers and leaves. And without a doubt, their shared interest in gardening kept them – and probably their children – grounded in the natural world.

But of course, times change, and younger people are more likely to become engaged in botanical organizations with more environmentally focused agendas, like the Native Plant Society or the Native Plant Salvage Foundation. Like the older garden clubs that often created and tended public gardens like the Centennial Rose Garden, these new organizations do provide community benefits and bring people together to collaborate and get good things done.

We can only hope they will provide the long-lasting friendships, the organizational skills, and the enduring charm of groups like the Friendly Flowers Garden Club.

We also hope that the Friendly Flowers group will attract and absorb a new generation of members who can both carry on and adapt its traditions to include greater cultural diversity and the youthful energy needed for the decades ahead.

These days, that might require providing child care for all the young working parents who attend.

Editor's Note: For more information about Friendly Flowers Garden Club, contact Donna Armitage on 360-567-6524. And for flower clubs outside of Thurston County, the Washington State Federation of Garden Club's website offers some references.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com