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Abloom Again: 70-Year-Old Garden Club Lively As Ever
By Katherine Williams
For a club with
fewer than 30 members, the Ellsworth Garden Club makes an impact
well beyond its roster.
Two members of the Ellsworth Garden Club, Lynn Tscheiller (at
left) and Mary Blackstone work side-by-side Tuesday afternoons
caring for the flowers at the Donald Little Memorial Park.
PHOTO BY KATHERINE WILLIAMS |
The members’ work
is visible at the well weeded and landscaped, triangle-shaped Donald
Little Memorial Park. It is bordered by State and School streets,
and Birch Avenue.
The club has
brought to bloom one of the city’s best-cultivated corners for more
than 47 years.
There are other
ways that the club stays busy through the seasons. But the annual
care and beautification of the park is the club’s pet project. It
honors Donald Little, valedictorian of the Ellsworth High School
Class of 1946, who died in the Korean War. The club dedicated the
park in his honor in 1955.
The club has a long
history, for it first organized in 1932 and joined the Garden Club
Federation of Maine in 1935. But it very nearly disbanded about two
years ago when the handful of members who remained were elderly and
unable to do the intensive gardening that the park needed.
Today, though,
membership is bounding back. They have monthly meetings with
programs and speakers, and weekly get-togethers at the park
(Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m.).
Mary Blackstone,
who has spent nearly her whole life around the Ellsworth Garden
Club, is providing a good part of its new energy. For years her
mother, Hazel Blackstone, now 94, was active in the club.
“I suppose I was
active, too, even before I was born,” Blackstone laughed. “The year
my mother was pregnant, she was going to a garden tour in Bangor at
the Wing sisters’ estate. They had picked dozens of marigolds just
for her, and they presented these to her.
“So she carried
them on her lap on the way home, but you know that marigolds don’t
necessarily smell all that good. So she was violently sick on the
way home, and I consider that my first garden experience.
“Actually, I have
been around the club ever since I can remember. I was raised in
gardens.”
Part of that is due
to her membership long ago in the club’s junior gardening program.
Some of the club’s
projects over the years have involved landscaping at some of
Ellsworth’s cemeteries, as well as the Black House and Cordelia
Stanwood Bird Sanctuary, all within city limits.
But Ellsworth
Garden Club membership isn’t limited to Ellsworth residents. The
club coordinates its meetings and projects with the Master Gardener
Volunteers program run by the
University
of Maine’s Cooperative Extension office on Boggy Brook Road.
The club recently
was the recipient of a $2,000 grant from the city. It is intended
for landscape development of one of the city’s older cemeteries on
State Street adjacent to the First Congregational Church. Together
with the Ellsworth Historical Society, which has some money to build
a fence around the cemetery, the club looks forward to that project.
“The city also
wants to do a sidewalk there, and we want to be part of making that
area look just a little nicer,” Blackstone said.
There were years
when the club was the envy of other clubs around the state, because
of all the prizes it claimed at state flower shows.
It continues to be
a club to envy because it is one of only two garden clubs in the
state that owns its own piece of land (in this case, the Donald
Little Memorial Park it so carefully cultivates). Deer Isle is the
other club that owns its own land, according to Ellsworth club
members.
The Ellsworth
Garden Club membership doubled in the last year when its revival was
a priority. Blackstone welcomes even more members, who need not be
all that experienced when it comes to digging in the dirt.
The club’s next
program is Monday, July 29, 7 p.m. at the Boggy Brook Road office of
the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. The speaker will be
Lois Stack, a University of Maine faculty member in horticulture,
talking about roses.
Anyone with an
interest in either gardening, or joining the Ellsworth Garden Club,
is welcome to call Mary Blackstone at 667-8878.
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