Four Mathews homes will be open all day Saturday for the local segment of Historic Garden Week in Virginia. They are Samarkand, Riverlawn, The Cottage and Eastham, and all are detailed in this week’s Section C of the Gazette-Journal.
The local tour is sponsored by the Garden Club of Gloucester and Mathews. Tickets were sold in advance and are sold out, according to the website for Garden Week.
Many other local historic sites are open to visitors on Saturday, and these are also discussed in related articles.
Historic Garden Week raises funds for restoration and preservation of more than 50 historic public gardens and landscapes throughout Virginia. More than 100 sites are open this year in the annual tour which begins Saturday and continues statewide through Saturday, April 30. For details, visit vagardenweek.org.
Name change
Those familiar with the annual tour may notice that the name of the local sponsoring club has changed.
The Garden Club of Gloucester, a community stalwart for 94 years and agent of beautification and conservation for all of those years, has now become The Garden Club of Gloucester and Mathews.
Club president Julie Stone said the change reflects reality.
“The current club has had a large number of members from Mathews County, and it just seemed time to recognize this fact,” she said.
In addition, referring to the club’s sponsorship of the local segment of Historic Garden Week, she said, “We have historically tried to alternate … tour homes between the two counties and have always been listed … in the (state) guidebook as the Gloucester-Mathews Tour.”
The nine-decades-plus of garden club history have brought periods of great challenge and some moments of achievement for the community.
Most recently, the club has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic. This forced cancellation of Garden Week in 2020 and a version of the tour with restrictions on its size and many safety measures in 2021. This year, the tour arrangements are more reflective of past years.
Stone said meetings were canceled early in 2020, but by the fall the club was able to meet virtually. The next year the club adopted a hybrid meeting model which continued until this month.
Connections helped to keep the club together, with members sharing photos of their gardens and arrangements.
Going into the deeper past, a club history by Anne Alexander Marshall reveals that the organization’s “first big community project was to partner with the County on building a wall around the courthouse circle, which previously had been an unlandscaped area where buggies and cars pulled right up to the courthouse.”
The club has supported Historic Garden Week in Virginia since the first one in 1929, Marshall said. For many years it planted and maintained flower boxes, no longer there, at the Edgehill intersection of Routes 14 and 17.
In the 1950s, young Brent Heath was sponsored by the garden club to attend nature camp; he went on to direct the camp in his young adult years and then to follow his family’s footsteps in becoming a renowned daffodil expert. He and his wife Becky now operate Brent and Becky’s flower farm and store at the entrance to Ware Neck.
For many years, the club sponsored the Gloucester Daffodil Show, and more recently has supported nature education programs and donated the daffodil sculptures that stand at either end of Main Street. For its 90th anniversary, the club donated $6,000 for a fountain for the pocket park on the site of the old Tucker’s Store on court circle.
Looking forward beyond this weekend’s garden tour, the Garden Club of Gloucester and Mathews is already planning for its 2023 Garden Week participation. The work goes on as it has since 1928.