The Garden-Club Ladies

IN a cartoonist's imagination, the ladies who belong to garden clubs are a Begonia Mafia who gather in print dresses and flowered hats to chatter about mulch and prettification. In some ways, of course, the ladies are responsible for their own image.

At least since Earth Day, however, the garden-club ladies have felt a certain smugness. America's garden clubs have been preaching conservation for years, albeit in modest and genteel ways. Last week when 600 delegates to the national council gathered in Chicago, they tended to say, "I told you so." Said Mrs. Howard Kittel of Fort Worth: "The image of the garden club has changed a great deal. People are beginning to look up to us for information rather than down at us for being a bunch of nuts. We are taking an environmental rather than a cosmetic approach." Added Mrs. Maxwell Steel of Huntingdon, Pa.: "The lovely art of floral arrangement is not one of our stated goals."

Decor was not neglected at the Sheraton-Chicago hotel, however. Each day's session had a color theme -pink for Tuesday, for example, with pink cloth tote bags emblazoned with red cardinals presented as favors. At one luncheon, the delegates sighed over a new strain of gladiolus christened the "Osa Mae Gladiolus," in honor of National Council President Mrs. Osa Mae Barton.

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In the midst of such floriated rituals, the ladies reviewed some of their serious projects. The South Atlantic Region of the council reported on the mini-parks it is developing in many urban areas. In Fort Worth, members successfully saved a botanical park from destruction by a proposed highway. Garden clubs in Idaho are campaigning to prevent wild rivers from being dammed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers. The ladies are not mounting massive environmental crusades, but cultivating their own gardens, brightening the land in a small way.

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In the most alarming moment of the Chicago convention, Mrs. Katherine Hedley of St. Louis, director of the Garden Clubs' foreign affiliates, fell backwards off a six-foot platform, breaking two bones in her foot; but she gamely recovered long enough to introduce the next speaker. The second biggest crisis occurred when the banquet waiters failed to set enough places at the head tables. Some feathers were ruffled as 15 ladies had to step down to dine at the floor-level tables. But all proceeded smoothly again through the ceremonies, when officers presented four $1,000 scholarships, Smokey Bear awards, an anti-litter trophy, and the flower arrangements and horticultural prizes.

For all the new popularity and urgency of the environmental issue, the garden-club members still worry that they have not shaken their old image. "I suppose," sighed one silver-haired delegate from Louisiana, "that they are going to call us all little old dowagers in tennis shoes, puttering around in our gardens." Said another: "They always used to call us petunia pickers. I wonder what they call us now."

"They call us," a third woman rejoined in the new pride the advent of environmental concern has engendered, "whenever they need someone to get some hard work done."

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