My father liked to garden — vegetables, flowers — it didn’t matter. Some said he had a “green thumb” and if he stuck a stick in the ground it would bloom. His vegetable garden was not exotic, just the usual tomatoes, bush green beans, cucumbers and zucchini. Oh, and he liked radishes. His flower tastes were also simple — petunias and geraniums, marigolds and gladiolus. He also grew tea roses and hibiscus. Every spring he could be found along with thousands of other gardeners at one of the myriad garden shops picking up a flat of this and a flat of that.
No indoor isolation with this “spring fever”; just working the soil, planting, weeding, and watering, yes, watering and watering. A 2018 National Gardening Survey reported 77% of American households engaged in gardening, spending an average of $503, totaling $47.8 billion on lawn and garden retail sales. This passion just didn’t happen; the seeds were planted over a century ago, germinated during a world at war, blossomed and spread over the ensuing years.
In 1904 the Garden Club of Philadelphia was organized with the objective “to promote an interest in gardens, their design, and management, to promote the protection of wildflowers and native plants and to encourage civic planting.” Additional clubs organized in Michigan, Illinois, Virginia, Connecticut, and elsewhere, came together with the Philadelphia club in 1913 to form the Garden Club of America. Indianapolis, too, had its burgeoning set of amateur gardeners, “regarded by some as good citizens with a flaw in their makeup.”
Acknowledging “there has been much fine planting done around homes,” the Park Garden Club was organized by James H. Lowry, Indianapolis parks superintendent, in December 1916 “to interest entire neighborhoods in cooperative movements for the beautifying of streets and to cause public officials to take better care of grounds surrounding public buildings.” The club had only a few meetings with lectures on “the planting and care of shrubberies” and Indiana wildflowers before America entered World War I and an emphasis was made to cultivate home and community vegetable gardens. In addition to offering lectures on how to add to the national food supply, the Park Garden Club offered programs on landscape gardening with advice on beautifying home grounds with the hope “to stimulate a more general interest in the planting of roses.”
In the late spring of 1917, the Patriotic Gardeners’ Association was formed to promote increased food production in the city, and by the end of the war 58,000 citizens were growing vegetables in backyard gardens. The association continued in the early post-war years offering gardening hints and providing seed packets and tomato and cabbage plants to about 40,000 people who continued to cultivate their home plots.
Gardening was not all about vegetables. In 1921 the Marigold Garden Club was formed, and in June 1922 five other flower clubs — American Iris, Rose, Peony, Dahlia, and Gladiolus — came together to form the Garden Flowers Society of Indianapolis for the purpose of promoting the beautification of the city’s yards. The society’s aims were supported by city leaders and the Indianapolis Star published a daily column, “Garden Flowers and the City Beautiful,” containing information on flowers, shrubs, and trees to help people beautify the grounds around their homes. Other like-mined organizations such as the Community Garden Club, in the vicinity of College Ave. and Fortieth St.; the North End Garden Club, in the Broad Ripple area; and the Irvington Garden Club were formed to advance an interest in flower gardening with informal talks on garden planning and plantings, seed guessing games, and exhibits displaying peonies, poppies, iris, and daisies.
City-wide clean-up campaigns and yard beautification contests gave gardeners an opportunity to show off their green thumbs, and others were encouraged by these events to take up gardening. However, not all amateur gardening was purely recreational. One gardener, Lulu Hughel of Irvington, not only had a prize-winning garden, but she also was an experimenter for the Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture, receiving exotic plants from all over the world — lilies from China, peach trees from Persia, lilacs from France — to see what would grow best in the central Indiana climate zone.
During the years of the Great Depression, gardening continued to be promoted, and one of the outstanding features of the annual Indianapolis Home Show were the garden exhibits of landscapers and garden clubs displaying everything from English gardens and French flower gardens to rustic gardens and bowling green gardens. The Indianapolis Garden Club was organized in 1930, and by the mid-thirties the city had fifteen active garden clubs. This horticultural enthusiasm carried over with the coming of World War II and the planting of victory gardens in backyards and vacant lots. However, Lulu Hughel, who was now president of the Garden Club of Indiana, cautioned against plowing up flower gardens —0 “we need the flowers for morale” — and recommended “planting a border of carrots around your flower bed.”
The post-war years saw a resumption of city-wide beautification efforts. The Indianapolis Council of Parent-Teacher Associations promoted “block beautification” as part of the city’s Cleanup-Paintup-Fixup campaign, and “Yard Parks” was the name given to the city project to beautify back yards. Indianapolis continued to benefit from these and other beautification efforts, and as more took up the spade and trowel garden clubs thrived. Today, Indianapolis has garden clubs with a long history of promoting gardening, others reconstituted from older roots, and those formed in recent years like the Garden Department of the Woman’s Department Club, the Indianapolis Garden Club, the Arbutus Garden Club, the Brookside Garden Club, the Spade & Trowel Garden Club, the Fall Creek Garden Club, the Green Thumb Garden Club, the Broad Ripple Garden Club, the Irvington Garden Club, the Benjamin Harrison Blossoms Garden Club, the Hillcrest Garden Club, the Sages Garden Club, and the Shamrock Garden Club.
During these uncertain times, the advice given to gardeners during World War II by Lulu Hughel ring true now as they did then, “we need the flowers for morale.”
