I attended a few meetings of our own local club, but so late in the season that I completely lost track of it over the winter. Which is a pity - there is no time when a gardener needs a club and other gardeners than when the active season outdoors is ending.
Avid gardeners are accustomed to spending huge chunks of their days outdoors, digging, weeding, transplanting, deadheading - and often simply admiring the results of our labors. For most of the active gardening season we feel needed --and we feel like creators, artists who have used the earth for a canvas and made a picture that pleases our souls.
And then comes that first killing frost - and our gardens need us to deadhead, mulch, rake and clean, and to start tucking in bulbs as a token of our faith that spring will come again.
And then one morning we get up and - there is nothing that needs doing. Our garden has been tucked into bed for the winter and we are at a loss. Oh - we still have work to do, meals to cook - all kinds of responsibilities. But for what seems like an endless amount of time our gardens no longer need us nearly as badly as we need them.
And THAT'S when we need a garden club!
In the first place, the time we no longer need to spend in the garden is often spent poring over the garden catalogs that have been arriving for some time now. Some of them are from companies that we know and trust, but others are new to us. Often they look interesting, but we don't have any idea whether the company is trustworthy, sends good plants and bulbs - or will only result in headaches and bad plants.
If we belonged to a garden club that would be a topic that could see us through several meetings - trading information about which companies excel at what - and which we should probably avoid.
That should result in our being to toss out a lot of those catalogs (thus giving us a tidier house) so that we can concentrate on the best ones. And what happens when we start to do that? If you are like me, you start to make endless lists of plants you think you probably can't live without.
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