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Is Gardening Your Passion? Then Join the Club!

Gardener’s Corner by Jacqueline Read

It’s more than coincidental that Coronado’s gardens are among the finest in the nation. Three floral organizations have been promoting the love of gardening and championing the appearance of island home and storefronts for decades. Here’s a little background fodder on each club:

Crown Garden Club

The year 1959 was a busy one for June Lenz. The Navy wife was president of her floral association in Annapolis when her husband received orders to report to Coronado. Dutifully, June kissed her East Coast flowers adieu and headed to the sunny climes of Coronado Island, and within weeks of her arrival she began sharing her love of gardening and floral design with her new friends and neighbors here.

“I started teaching flower arranging in the back yard of our house, primarily to other Navy wives, but soon the word got out — you know how things travel fast in a small town,” Lenz said.

“Soon my house looked like the back room of a florist shop,” she confessed with a smile. “My family was very cooperative. But they got tired of tripping over the debris.”

Lenz’s circle of friends and students formed the nucleus of the Crown Garden Club, which was incorporated July 30, 1959.

“We had 10 members that first year,” Lenz remembers. Three of the founding members, Barbara Seawell, Sue Williams and Betty Cannon, also continue to call Coronado home.

“We began on a shoestring,” Lenz said. “But the timing was right, and timing is everything, you know. The Floral Association was just taking off, too. We hooked up together and helped each other.”

Today, the Crown Garden Club, over 200 members strong, is still dedicated to its founding tenets, “to stimulate and encourage the knowledge and love of gardening; to aid in the protection, preservation and beautification of Coronado and its environs and to study and discuss arrangement of plants and flowers in order to bring nature’s loveliness into our daily lives.”

The club meets at 9 a.m. on the third Thursday of every month at the Winn Room of the Coronado Library. Membership is by invitation from current members.

Club President Helen Behner said the club engages in several beautification projects throughout the city. Members provide fresh flowers each week for the library, care for the June Miller Garden in Spreckels Park, have assisted in landscaping of Strand Elementary School, and enter a float in the annual Fourth of July parade.

Miller, who continues to live in Coronado, was an early, active member of the club, “a workhorse who was a very fine arranger who took many awards at each year’s Flower Show,” said Lenz.

Behner says she most enjoys the club’s ambitious annual December charity drive.

“We have a special meeting where we decorate live trees and deliver them to Villa Coronado, a long-term care facility, and to shut-ins whose names we get from various organizations,” she said.

Bridge and Bay Garden Club

“We are the flamingos,” says Bridge and Bay Garden Club President Betty Reynolds, referring to the Fourth of July parade in which club members march as pink flamingos.

Annual membership in the 30-year-old club is $25 and open to the public. Meetings are held at 9 a.m. on the fourth Monday of each month, September through May, in the Library’s Winn Room. A board of directors installation luncheon is held at a local restaurant in June. The group is currently 105 members strong.

Reynolds describes the mission of the club as “encouraging interest in home gardening, better horticultural practices, civic activities, the principles of artistic design, and conservation of natural resources.” In keeping with its conservation pledge, the club has donated funds over the years for the planting of 33 acres of pines in the Cleveland National Forest.

Reynolds most enjoys the club’s floral education programs and speakers. This October, the gardener who runs the annual mums festival at The San Diego Wild Animal Park spoke to the group and the following week escorted the membership on a personal tour of the exhibit.

The club also gives poinsettias to the library each December and sponsors monthly “Spot of Beauty” awards to merchants to encourage the use of plants and flowers in, and salute the appearance of, island storefronts.

Coronado Floral Association (Find a Coronado Florist)

The Coronado Floral Association, with 665 members, organizes the Coronado Flower Show and the judging of home fronts each spring. In addition to a sizable donation from the city of Coronado, both garden clubs donate money, time and plant material to the Coronado Flower Show. “It’s now the largest, tented flower show in the Western United States,” explained Sondi Arndt, current president of the association.

Arndt says the association’s mission is simply to foster the knowledge and love of horticulture and flowers.

This year’s Flower Show, the 78th annual, will take place on Saturday, April 26, and Sunday, April 27. The show is judged by professional judges, most of them living in Southern California, who adhere to “Standard Flower Show” judging criteria. But most of the entries in the show are amateur Coronado gardeners and designers, including schoolchildren.

Speaking of judging, the Floral Association judges every single home front in Coronado about a month before the Flower Show. The two garden clubs supply the core 100 people needed for judging. Then the presidents of the two garden clubs, the Floral Association president and the Flower Show chairman pick the top 10 houses from the citywide blue ribbon finalists.

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Reprinted with permission from Coronado Lifestyle, "the little magazine with the BIG impact."
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