The first meeting over which I presided will remain with me always. There were so many details - setting up the room, refreshments, coffee, display tables, program and on and on. I was so nervous about all these details and how it would come together. When I arrived at the meeting space, people were already organizing the room. There was nothing for me to do. I just marveled at how everyone who agreed to do a job did it — and even did it better than expected. I knew from that moment forward that I could totally rely on this marvelous membership of women, plus a few men. Our total membership was 400, with over 200 hundred attending the meetings.
My second meeting also had its stress. In October there were huge fires in the East County burning land, forests and homes. Organizations across San Diego County were canceling their meetings. I decided to move forward with ours feeling that in this time of peril we needed the fellowship of each other and the positive nature of our program. As a lover of poetry, and feeling that poems often spoke to the soul when nothing else did, I decided to open the meeting reading a poem by Mary Oliver with her focus on nature and precision of language. I was thanked for this by so many people, that I began opening the meetings each month with a poem. In addition to speaking to many of us, it also quieted the room for the business portion of the morning to begin.
Our established committees worked wonderfully, our programs, led by Penelope West, spoke to us over a scope of garden, floral and environmental topics. The Club moved forward with energy and enthusiasm as always.
A challenging moment came in the late fall when I had a phone call for our founder and advisor, Adrienne Green. Her former garden club in New England had a program presented by the floral designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Remco Van Vliet. She informed me that she had hired him for a yet to be decided date for $6000. I gulped!!! The programs were already established, and we didn’t have that amount of money to spare. With consultation with other leaders in the Club, it was decided to open this program to the community at large. I talked with the leadership of the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, located in La Jolla, and rented the Sherwood Hall auditorium for a date in the spring. We decided to charge a substantial entrance fee which included a luncheon at the Woman’s Club of La Jolla across the street. We began advertising. Not too surprisingly, we had an excellent turn out. Remco was as amazing a designer as expected. And, we had a very successful raffle of his floral designs at the end of the meeting. The whole event was so successful that we moved forward to include it as an annual part of our projects. We decided to call it Meet the Masters.
Two other new projects during my presidency were the short-term Athenaeum Re-landscaping Project led by Connie Mullin Branscomb and the La Jolla Historic Society’s Wisteria Cottage Renovation Project led by Betty Vale.
Being President of the Village Garden Club of La Jolla was a great honor and the most rewarding volunteer position I ever held. I am so thankful to have had this opportunity to direct and embrace this amazing membership in fulfilling their talents.