The Club Today

November 21, 2022 (Michael Hanlon, Angel Maldonado, and Juan Penate removing perennials). Photo by Annette LaMond.

Garden Club members set to work – pruning existing plant material, including the existing crabapple trees. Out of this hands-on work came a collaborative design for a garden that would represent a colonial-era Brattle Street estate in miniature. Features: yew hedges, herb garden within a boxwood circle, lilacs, and orchard. To realize the plan, members propagated boxwood and yews. (Those yews have grown into the hedges that are now one of the garden’s most prominent features.) A great deal was accomplished on a surprisingly small budget.

In 1966, the Garden Club merged with the Plant Club to form the Cambridge Plant & Garden Club. With the Hooper-Lee-Nichols garden in good condition, the club focused their united energies on other projects. A club committee continued to tend the grounds at Hooper-Lee-Nichols, but it was a low-key effort.

In the late 1980s, the CP&GC returned to the HLN garden, re-digging and expanding the front perennial beds. Since then, the club, which is a 501(c)(3), has added several trees, funded annual hand-clipping of the yew hedges, lawn care, and tree-pruning. Other projects: restoration of the front gate, the grape trellis, brick edging and paths, and most recently the drainage border behind the front perennial bed. Along the way, the club has held regular work days, featuring cleanups, bulb planting, pruning, deadheading, and weeding. By the estimate of the club historian, nearly 100 CP&GC members have volunteered their time in the garden.

Just before COVID-19 descended, CP&GC members were discussing whether it was time to undertake a major revision of the garden. The perennial beds had become crowded. On the west side of the house, the last boxwoods had been removed along with the dogwood and climb-ing rose planted in the early 1960s. On the east side, far more shady than in the days when the Garden Club began working in the garden, only one fruit tree of the miniature orchard survived. The old chestnut tree along the front fence had been taken down after a long decline.

December 1, 2022 (Perennial beds, re-edged with new soil). Photo by Annette LaMond.

This October, club workers kicked off the garden renovation – timing that marks the 60th anniversary year of the club’s first project. A large number of perennials were removed from the perennial beds where some species had become overgrown and dominant, and defied the efforts of the club’s best weeders. Many of these perennials (asters, phlox, lamb’s ear, Japanese anemone, and speedwell) were then re-planted at two other club project sites: On The Rise women’s shelter in mid-Cambridge and the Cambridge Community Center in the Riverside neighborhood. The transplanting effort was followed by two days of welcome rain, increasing the odds that they will thrive in their new homes.

To reconstruct the HLN beds, the club hired Cambridge plantsman Michael Hanlon and his crew to remove the last and largest plants, some of which were salvaged, planted for later use in a holding bed behind the garage. The crew then removed six inches of soil to help with the eradication of invasives, and added a soil-compost mix. As significant as the soil improvement, they reduced the beds to more manageable size, straightening the front edge and rounding the corner to the screen porch. The beds have been covered with salt marsh hay for the winter.

December 2, 2022 (Beds covered with salt marsh hay for the winter). Photo by Annette LaMond.

Over the winter, while the new soil is rejuvenating the old, CP&GC members will be designing new perennial beds where native plants can be integrated with hybrids, adding habitat for birds and butterflies. In the spring we will be planting anew.

Also on the agenda: club members are looking at options for a new shade tree at the southwest corner of the property to replace the ancient horse chestnut. The type of tree is yet to be determined, but a top candidate is the magnificent and long-lived Quercus alba, the White Oak, one of the preeminent hardwoods native to eastern and central North America.

— Annette LaMond & Maggie Booz, December 2022