Susan’s garden club marching in the July 4th parade.
Amy’s recent post about garden clubs got me thinking about how lonely it is in modern America, being a serious gardener, and how nice it would be to about to talk to other serious gardeners and to learn from them and crib pieces of their most interesting perennials.
Thank God for the web, of course. But until we can send virtual divisions and virtual drinks to each other, it’s not perfect.
Joining a gardening club seems like one possibility, though from the comments on Amy’s post, it sounds as if a lot of those clubs are more concerned with raising money for charity and maintaining institutional gardens than with allowing the obsessed to vent. Worthy, but not necessarily perfect for Garden Rant readers.
If you have only a limited amount of time and a limited tolerance for bureaucy, a garden club strikes me as not ideal. No, ideal would be a garden pub. Someplace to drop into, find kindred spirits, brag a bit about what looks great and complain about what doesn’t.
Frankly, I’d love to sit down with old ladies who’ve been gardening for 50 years over whiskey sours. I love visiting my 78 year-old aunt on her dairy farm in Lowville, NY because she is pretty serious about her vegetables and I always learn something from her. Though this aunt hardly qualifies as a gentle old lady. She hunts. She fishes. She has acidic political opinions.
Having visited Elizabeth in Buffalo, it’s clear that she belongs to a real gardening community, one where it is probably not a strain to find somebody to talk about gardening with. It sounds as if Susan is completely networked, too, in the DC area. When I visited Detroit in June, I envied the urban farmers there the Garden Resources Program Collaborative, a group of young idealists determined to network Detroit’s gardeners in order to beautify the city.
