This Oregon Coast garden club is celebrating its 75th anniversary

At 83, retired teacher Jean Turner still loves to get down and dirty in the garden. Her yard is an oasis of apple blossoms, birds and daffodils.

Turner said she inherited her green thumb from her grandmother, who helped start the Seal Rock Garden Club on the Oregon Coast back in 1948.

“The ladies were real different then,” Turner said. “They wore gloves. They wore long, usually floral kinds of dresses. Scarves. Oh and a hat. It’s different than now. We show up in Levi’s.”

This spring, as people across the Pacific Northwest plant their perennials, members of the Seal Rock Garden Club are also celebrating their 75th anniversary. That’s a long time for a little gardening club.

Back in 1948, stores were far and few between, and growing things along the coast required local knowledge, hence the need for a gardening club.

The Seal Rock group started in the era when World War II rationing was fading and fridges were coming into vogue. Local clubs were also becoming more popular, and any club worth its salt had to have a location.

In 1950, Seal Rock members noticed the U.S. Forest Service was auctioning off some huts that had been used to house conscientious objectors. Turner said the club held a fundraiser to buy one. Her grandmother set up a tent, dressed in robes and told fortunes.

“People would come in, and she’d pour them a cup of tea. And when they were done, she’d take the tea cup and turn it upside down on something white. And she would tell them their fortune,” Turner said, laughing. “Read those tea leaves.”

In the end, the club raised enough to win the auction at $306, $1 more than the next highest bid.

The building had to be cut into pieces, hauled to Seal Rock on trucks and nailed back together again. But Turner believes that little yellow clubhouse, right next to the fire station on Highway 101, is the reason their group has lasted 75 years.

“We have a building, and we have to maintain it,” she said. “So we have to have some activities.”

Hundreds of people will line up around the block for their annual plant and garden art sale on June 10. Similar crowds will form for the Christmas wreath sale later in the year.

Club historian Jean Girard said the money raised also helps club members support other community efforts, like new seed banks at the public libraries in nearby Newport and Waldport.

“These women were part of building this community,” Girard said of the club’s members. “Out of this building came the fire department, the water department, street paving, street lights. They were creating this community.”

Club membership has ebbed and flowed over the years, as gardening went in and out of fashion. Membership is $30 a year, and the club meets the third Wednesday of every month.

Perhaps the club’s most tumultuous time came in 1957 when the National Gardening Association required flower show winners to be decided by a jury rather than an individual. The idea was to avoid favoritism and make things fairer.

Girard said Seal Rock decided not to pick winners at all and left the association, never to return.

“They just didn’t want to be judged,” she said. “I also think they didn’t want to judge each other.”

They thought it was friendlier to work in cooperation rather than competing to impress.

Today, the club numbers 60 people. Membership swelled during the COVID pandemic as more people began gardening seriously because they couldn’t socialize.

The club responded by holding monthly Zoom meetings, a boon to younger members who usually couldn’t get to the club in the middle of the day because of work.

Kathy Hovermale, 63, moved to Seal Rock a year and a half ago. She had been gardening for decades, but in the high desert climate of Bend.

Related: Don't overthink your vegetable garden 🌱

She said she has learned all kinds of important tips at the Seal Rock Garden Club, like which vegetables thrive in proximity to each other — onions, for example, apparently do well near beets and carrots, but not peas or beans.

Fertilizer is another subject of discussion. Milk, for example, helps grow prize pumpkins.

“I really want to learn from the older members and experts,” Hovermale said. “There are some master gardeners that are within our group.”

Club member Carrie Davis said the action now seems to revolve around raised garden beds.

“As we grow older, nobody wants to bend over all afternoon in that garden,” she said. " It’s kind of nice to walk up to it and not have to do a deep bend in the knees and then try to get up after four hours.”

Davis, a transplant from California, said she’s found kindred souls in the club.

She said today’s members are just as likely to have come to the Oregon Coast to retire from Illinois or Corvallis, as to have lived in Seal Rock all their lives.

The typical new member, she said, “is somebody who’s running around trying to ask people, ‘Can I grow anything here? What do I grow?’”

In short, the club is a close-knit community of mostly women who share that common joy of planting something and watching it grow.

“I find it to be one of the most fulfilling, calming, humbling things to do,” said Girard.

She is currently enthralled by dahlias. She has 80 plants. But she’s in the middle of a battle with the local gastropods, who also love dahlias.

“I do on occasion resort to slug bait, it’s not my favorite,” Davis said. “Wood ashes, copper, going out and gathering them at night. Beer in a cat food can. Spraying them with ammonia. Spraying them with ground-up slugs. There are a lot of different slug repellents.”

The club is an endless source of such horticultural hints.

Members will celebrate its 75th anniversary with an open house in the fall.