Update Location
Enter a ZIP code to get product recommendations and information tailored to your area.
Not your grandma’s garden club anymore
Not Your Grandma’s Garden Club Anymore
Shaking off their prim and proper image, these groups are getting reinvented in amazing ways. We bet you’ll be ready to join one after reading this.
By: Ingrid K. Williams
On the last Sunday of each month, a couple dozen young Angelenos gather at Junior High, an LGBTQ+ community arts center in Glendale, California, to spend the morning tending an unusual native plant garden. On a strip of land between the sidewalk and curb (called a parkway in California), the 50-foot garden is often trampled by neighborhood dogs and kids en route to classes at the adjacent martial arts club. But the members of Club Gay Gardens, an inclusive gardening club that skews young and queer, have transformed this sun-scorched patch of arid land into a thriving bed of native flora with California sagebrush and buckwheat, apricot mallow, bush sunflower, monkey flower, poppies, fuchsia, lupin and yarrow.
Garden clubs are nothing new; they’ve been around for over a century. The first, the Ladies Garden Club of Athens, Georgia, was founded in 1891. Back then, membership to traditional horticultural societies and botany groups, some dating to Colonial times, was closed to women, so they started their own garden clubs to focus on nature and the beautification of public spaces. The members — almost exclusively wealthier white women — also organized around progressive causes ranging from historic preservation and restoration projects to women’s activism.
Today many still associate garden clubs with a 1950s-era stereotype of housewives (or elderly ladies) gathering for tea or luncheons, trading tips on tending their English climbing roses and planning field trips to flower shows and botanical gardens. But these days, a new breed of garden club is taking root across the country, driven by younger generations seeking community while connecting with nature. There are networking garden clubs geared toward mid-career Millennials and social meet-ups for Gen Zers who crave an eco-friendly hobby, not a bar crawl.
Club Gay Gardens, for example, is not your grandma’s garden club (though any grandma who wanted to join would surely be welcome!). “It started out with just a few people at our monthly event,” said Maggie Smart-McCabe, 27, who founded the club in 2022 together with Linnea Torres, 29. Now, they often have a few dozen people turn up to the Sunday event.
“A big part of how we frame Club Gay Gardens is community building, but there’s also a lot of skill-sharing and professional development stuff,” she said. Some of the Gay Gardeners have gone on to start their own landscaping business, she said, while others have been inspired to study environmental sciences.
Grassroots gardening groups have spread in many cities across the country, like the Brooklyn-based Green Guerillas, a diverse coalition focused on volunteering and supporting urban gardens in park-poor areas. There are also intergenerational gardening programs, like the longstanding Roots & Shoots program at Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, California. More casual garden clubs are also on the rise, many organized through Meetup, such as the Oregon-based Portland Plants Group, which gathers regularly for repotting sessions, propagating lessons, and “come with cuttings” plant swaps.
Virtual and verdant
Not all garden clubs gather IRL. Since Covid, some garden clubs meet solely on Zoom, while others are social-media-based, such as Black Girls with Gardens, an online community with an active Facebook group and over 160,000 followers on Instagram that shares tips for tending edible gardens.
Perhaps the biggest news in this space yet: Martha Stewart, the renowned gardening doyenne, is galvanizing a new generation of fans and connecting them. She and Miracle-Gro (where she serves as Chief Gardening Officer) have launched Martha’s Garden Collective, a new online community and gardening resource. It connects Martha with green-thumbed followers across the country, through videos of what’s growing in her garden and tips and tricks she’s learned over a lifetime, as well as shared content from the Collective’s members.
Bring on the beginners
While old-school garden clubs might seem to be the domain only of those who are skilled at espalier, this is no longer the case. Whether in person or online, aspiring gardeners can now find a club of like-minded people, even without having their own plot of land, thriving houseplants, or any prior experience with gardening.
“A lot of the time, we’re people’s first exposure to gardening,” said Maggie Smart-McCabe, who is now rallying the Club Gay Gardens community around a second parkway garden. Her goal is to do more to preserve native flora on L.A. streets and to grow the close-knit community that’s blossomed within the group. Inclusive, diverse, and community-minded, the next generation of garden clubs has arrived.
About the Writer
Based in Stockholm, Sweden and Brooklyn, N.Y., Ingrid K. Williams is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to The New York Times.