Jacqueline Houston is a member of the Wedgwood Garden Club, and also a Master Gardener of King County. She has been gardening in Seattle for over 30 years, and now has a garden consulting/coaching business called Enchanted Garden Consulting. Wedgwood Garden Club always welcomes new members – contact Jacqueline at tppoems@comcast.net for more information on our monthly meetings.
For our October garden meeting we were unable to find a speaker and instead, for the first time ever, scheduled a gardener’s show’n’tell. Members were invited to bring anything they wanted to our meeting, and it turned out to be fascinatingly varied and very enjoyable.
Two members brought plants from their garden that they were ready to give away after talking up their finer points (I scored a beautiful tall, deep pink aster for my own garden). Two or three members brought samples of their favorite dahlias, and one described how popular her single dahlias were with the bees.
Someone brought a carved-out pumpkin planted up as a pumpkin garden with a Halloween theme – orange and black pansies, with black mondo grass. I pounced on this idea as a project for my preschoolers to do (see photo) – I can hardly believe I never thought of this myself, it seems so obvious now.
One member brought 4 or 5 beautiful Japanese-made tools from a specialist garden store in Portland, including a very narrow shovel for getting into tight spots, and a tiny saw no wider than a comb, useful for tricky little cuts on her rose bushes. Another member then brought out one of her own favorite tools – a plain old table knife, very useful for digging weeds out from between pavers.
My own contribution was a novel called Rules for Visiting, by Jessica Francis Kane, the only novel I have read that features a gardener that I believe in and would like to meet, as opposed to the sappy sentimental versions I had encountered up to then.
And finally, my co-president brought a tray set out with fragrant sprigs from her herb garden, 10 or so herbs that she uses regularly in cooking, which we all handed around and inhaled gratefully.
The evening was a wonderful reminder of the pool of enthusiasm, knowledge and experience that a garden club represents. Do come join us sometime.