Focus on flowers for your next garden club program.
Whether you enjoy digging and planting or just creating arrangements from cut flowers, the delicate petals and fragrant aromas of flowers may bring beauty to your day. When you’re brainstorming ideas for your next garden club program or event, consider flower power as your inspiration. No matter if your garden club meets once per week or only a few times a year, you can come up with fresh, blooming ideas for members of the club to enjoy. Does this Spark an idea?
State Pride
Let the focus of your next event be on your state’s officially designated flower. Many options are available when you make your state’s flower the centerpiece. Residents of an Ohio garden club, for example, have the scarlet carnation as their state flower. If scarlet carnations aren’t available, a few drops of red food coloring may be mixed with water and sprayed onto the flowers with a mister. After they dry, the garden club can offer these state-specific flowers at its next sale. Another idea is to feature the flower in other ways. Vermont, for example, lists the red clover as its state flower. Crafty and creative members of your club can produce handmade items for your next sale, such as hand-knit clovers, watercolor red clovers and even stationery and hand-lettered envelopes with red clovers.
Eco Conscious
The next time your garden club is called upon to make a presentation or conduct a program, consider providing information on how residents can not only keep their gardens green with plants, but environmentally-friendly green as well. Offer information about composting (suggest that members of the club who live close to each other go in on a composter together), stress the importance of not plucking wild flowers or plants, and demonstrate and discuss the different "green" chemicals available. Members of the club can weigh in on the different products they use in their gardens, such as bug sprays, sod, plant food and peat moss, explaining how each affects the environment.
Road Trip
Gardens around the country may serve as inspiration for your members’ own gardens when you take a road trip to visit other flowering areas. Whether you drive just a couple of minutes to a garden in your town or offer a road trip package to your club to view renowned gardens states away, your next garden club program will have you learning the history and culture of flowers, as well as admiring them. Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, for example, offers 1,500 acres of plants and flowers, with 20 indoor and outdoor gardens each, plus fountains, a conservatory, outdoor concerts and special events such as a touch and taste of lavender celebration.
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