Note: You do not have to live in Willow Glen to join the Willow Glen Garden club and not all events are ADA-compliant.
The First Club Meeting
Out of the pandemic the Willow Glen Garden Club seedlings were born.
Dutifully sheltering at home, my pent up energy was going into my garden, but there was no other garden enthusiast to share it with. Wouldn’t it be nice to talk with others about the value of home made compost, the sweetness of emerging seedlings or the importance of pruning tomatoes? The isolation was piling up and that left me feeling a bit brave. So I got the wild idea to put myself out there and try and start a gardening club. Surely there were others wanting the same thing?
In September 2021 I created a social media post to see if anyone out there felt the same way as me. They did!
RSVPs started to come in and a handful of the most lovely people showed up to the first zoom call (I was so nervous I’d be the only one there :-). Yay! I wasn’t alone. One person shared that she likes to plant a salsa garden each year. Another person was all about her indoor plants and was ready to learn how to garden outdoors. While one woman came from a family of avid gardeners and her particular passion was her collection of roses. And yet another woman dialed in as she sat on the sidelines of her child’s game and shared about her Free Little Farm Stand she built so neighbors could share their homegrown produce and flowers. These were my kind of people! We all agreed that we wanted to start a gardening club.
A lack of liability insurance (that we needed before we could meet in person) meant we needed to meet on zoom calls while I worked on getting our club established so we could apply for insurance. We would share how our gardens were doing, what we were working on, plans for future gardens and discussing how to build this club. What did we want the club to be like? We all agreed that we want something social, low key and focused on gardening.
As of Spring 2022 we have liability insurance and are now shifting to a hybrid approach to our meetings with some of them being on zoom and some in person events.
Some of our member’s have offered to give us Garden Tours of their personal gardens while we get to know one another a bit better in real life. I am so excited for this! These are scheduled for this spring and summer on our websites’ home page.
I’m so grateful for the leadership of our Executive Board: Secretary – Sanjit; Social Media & Treasurer – Jeanna & Membership Chairwoman and Webmaster – Zoe. These women have helped build this website, establish social media, make flyers, welcome new members, and organize the meetings and step in when I wasn’t well. I am so grateful for you guys!
And I also want to give a big thank you to Roseann who is our Santa Clara County District Representative of the California Garden Club, Inc. (CGCI). She has been there to answer all my questions on how to start a club from scratch and has provided us with start up materials. The WGGC are members of the CGCI who in turn provides us our liability insurance, advertising materials, discounts nation wide, and support on all things club related. Thank you, Roseann!
And most importantly, thank you WGGC members for joining up! It’s just a wonderful thing to enjoy gardening along side you.
May your gardens always be abundant!
Sarah Mitchell – Willow Glen Garden Club President and Founder
Willow Glen Garden Club 