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CommunityGarden club still blooming after 50 years
Friday, June 13, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Grace Sturdevant of Prince Frederick is the last original founding member of the 50-year-old Chesapeake Garden Club still living on the East Coast.
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Every two years, the club has a flower show. This year’s event included a slide show of the history of the group, the members, what they represented and the people in the community that they helped. The back room held a display of flowers and an exhibit of the life cycle of a butterfly.
‘‘Mary Porter [an original member] sent me information about how the first club came into existence,” said Mary Alys Sweetman of Chesapeake Beach, the current president of the club. Porter currently lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is 97 years old.
According to Joellen Youngblud of Sunderland, there are three divisions in the flower show. The first is horticulture, which includes plants grown by members of the club and it’s divided by classes; the second division is the design division, which offered 16 different designs by the members. The third division is exhibits, including the butterfly exhibit.
‘‘I took first in the horticulture division,” said Youngblud, the vice president of the club.
‘‘My neighbor entered the show and I took my mother here to see ikebana [Japanese flower arranging,]” said Barbara Rolston of St. Leonard. ‘‘It’s interesting to see all the displays and we have enjoyed the show.”
Grace Sturdevant of Prince Frederick is one of the original members and founders of the group. A lot of the members were part of the Calvert County Homemakers Club and they were interested in horticulture. One day, someone came by to show and give them some tips on horticulture and it sparked an interest ever since.
‘‘It was a terrific bunch of women, I enjoyed being with them and we had fun together,” Sturdevant said. ‘‘We learned a lot together.”
Sturdevant said that in the last 50 years, membership has included a younger crowd. At first, most of the members were retired. They worked on landscaping and helped each other with their gardens, arranging them and sharing plants. In accordance with the time they also made hats. There were about 30 regular active members. Sturdevant emphasized that the women were always there for each other, ready and able to help where they could.
Over the years, the club grew from a group of women who just met in homes to a club that serves the community and puts on flower shows.
‘‘I joined in 1963. All the best friends I have ever made were garden-clubbers,” said Vicki Treggo of North Beach. ‘‘It’s been wonderfully educational because they do have programs [at the University of Maryland] where you can be a flower show judge and learn landscape design.”
The slide show highlighted the club’s accomplishments. The club started out by helping to landscape the front of the Calvert County library in 1964, cosponsored the Optimist Club with their recycling program, and planted memorial plants for the Calvert County Nursing Home in the late 1960s. Through the years, they also worked with other groups towards the beautification of the county and most recently participated in the clean-up of Battle Creek Cypress Swamp.
‘‘The only problem with joining the club is that you never get to your own yard,” Trego said. ‘‘You are always so busy with helping others that my yard went to pot.”
Currently, the purpose of the club is to stimulate interest in horticulture and visit improvements throughout the county, to promote all phases of conservation, to aid in the protection of trees, shrubs, wild flowers and birds and to study all aspects of gardening.
