You may not know it, but working quietly to preserve the beauty of Rye is a group of talented women of all ages. The 60 active and 37 sustaining and affiliate members of the Rye Garden Club (RGC) share a love of gardening and the natural world and are dedicated to the Garden Club of America’s mission to stimulate a knowledge and love of gardening.
By Sarah Barringer
You may not know it, but working quietly to preserve the beauty of Rye is a group of talented women of all ages. The 60 active and 37 sustaining and affiliate members of the Rye Garden Club (RGC) share a love of gardening and the natural world and are dedicated to the Garden Club of America’s mission to stimulate a knowledge and love of gardening.
Throughout town, the Rye Garden Club is at work. RGC members replant those lovely pots along Purchase Street and Purdy Street every season. You may see the them planting and pruning the pots at 8:30 one morning, spades and gardening gloves a-going. The gardens at the Square House and Rye Free Reading Room are also maintained by the RGC. Rye Recreation’s bushes and springtime daffodils were put in place by the club, and the traffic Island by the Knapp House was recently redesigned and replanted by the group. Slow down and take a look at this lovely little garden next time you pass by.
This holiday season, RGC members will craft the wreaths that adorn City Hall, the Square House, and the Rye Free Reading Room. They’re working together with the Little Garden Club to decorate the library inside and out for the holidays. And the ladies of the RGC are already preparing holiday cheer, growing amaryllis bulbs to be delivered in early December to municipal offices around town.
For almost every holiday through the year, RGC members gather to create flower arrangements for Meals on Wheels trays to add a touch of fun and beauty for homebound senior citizens.
If you have children in nursery school or second grade at a Rye school, your little ones will probably get to work with RGC members this year. The club’s Conservation Committee visits 3-year and 4-year-old nursery school classrooms to teach a lesson about Drip and Drop. This interactive lesson of stories and songs acquaints children with the water cycle and helps them understand why water is a precious resource. Second graders will work with the Rye Garden Club’s Enviroscape in an interactive lesson about water pollution. The Enviroscape is a model of a watershed area, much like Rye, to which students add pollutants and then add “rain” and watch the effects of pollution on water bodies and ground water.
In spring, the RGC will sponsor field trips to the MRF, the Materials Recovery Facility in Yonkers, to see and learn about the recycling processes in our area.
The Conservation Committee is working to educate grown-ups too; look for the Green Space column in each edition of this paper for articles on environmental stewardship. Also, if you have a little time to spare, visit the Jay Heritage Center’s carriage house (it’s open Tuesday through Friday from 10-5) and take a free tour of the Rye Garden Club’s Home Green Home Dollhouse. This award-winning dollhouse and its landscape demonstrates green building and decorating techniques, water run-off mitigation, and practices that can be incorporated into the home, property, and daily life to conserve resources and promote sustainability.
The women of the Rye Garden Club are proud of their affiliation with the Garden Club of America — a national organization of over 18,000 members founded nearly 100 years ago — and of all they do to beautify and make our environment more enjoyable and sustainable.
— Photo by Kathleen Durkee