I’ve written about Honolulu’s botanical gardens several times in Rearview Mirror. At a talk I gave to their “Friends” earlier this year, I met a sister group whose focus is on individual gardens.
The Garden Club of Honolulu was founded in January 1930 by home gardeners who loved beauty and flowers. The purpose of the club was “to promote the intelligent development of the individual garden.” They met at each other’s homes to share what they learned with one another.
When you think of a garden club, you might have mental images of well-heeled women sipping tea amid baskets of roses. As you will see, the Garden Club is much more than that. It’s into conservation, education, job training and even tourism.
At first the ladies had little hands-on experience with outdoor gardens, Jann Boxold, club president, told me. Most worked with full-time yardmen, wrote Laura Dowsett and Evanita Midkiff in 1980. Few of them did the actual gardening, but “with a parasol held high over their heads and sensible shoes, they would supervise the work.”
Specialists on native plants, fertilizers and garden tools were invited to speak at meetings.
Garden tours started in the 1930s, and members had to have a garden to show to visitors or other members. “There was much ambition evident — one strove for the largest rose, the most beautiful African violets or the most unusual hibiscus. The pride that developed was understandable,” Dowsett and Midkiff said.
Their first flower show was held at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1931. Flowers magnificent, humble, exotic and old-fashioned, large and small, fragrant and odorless, sturdy and delicate — flowers of every kind and for every occasion were exhibited.
Interesting for this columnist to discover was that the Garden Club re-established the custom of giving flowers to those recuperating in hospitals. In 1933 it formed a Hospital Flower Supply Committee at Queen’s. This project was turned over to the Queen’s Hospital Auxiliary in 1953.
During World War II the club got into action. Members drove ambulances for the Red Cross, worked as nurses’ aides folded bandages and arranged for entertainment for hospitalized servicemen. Victory gardens helped feed the population.
In 1949 the Garden Club put on a flower show in New York. Masses of flowers and plants were shipped to Rockefeller Center, and Manhattanites flocked to see the Hawaii Garden. A hundred dozen anthuriums were sent for the opening.
The “Hawaii Comes to New York” show ran for four weeks, and plant material needed constant replacement. It was an expensive project, but it brought wonderful publicity for Hawaii after the war.
One visitor said it was “one of the loveliest things that’s ever happened here.”
In 1967 the club was asked for an encore appearance at Rockefeller Center. The Hawaiian Garden stood for a month. It featured three “huts” — one for flower lei (replaced daily), one with many varieties of anthuriums, and the third held an outrigger canoe filled with Hawaii fruits and flowers.
Two hundred square feet of rock slabs connected the huts, and it was surrounded with ohia, heliconia, ginger, bird of paradise, orchids, bamboo, palm fronds and ti cuttings. Maui sent 28 bags of black beach pebbles.
Twelve dozen tree ferns weighing over 10,000 pounds were shipped to New Jersey where they were cared for in hothouses in the winter to produce new ferns for the summer show.
The exhibition attracted about 200,000 people a day, the papers reported.
Saks Fifth Avenue, across the street, decorated its store windows in a “Salute to Hawaii” motif. Radio City Music Hall scheduled monthlong Hawaiian music and dance programs.
The Garden Club’s many civic endeavors included planting palms at Washington Place, providing potted plants and trees for the Academy of Arts and the East-West Center.
The club assisted with the restoration of the gardens at Washington Place. “Everything needed attention,” Dowsett and Midkiff wrote, “and together with the Outdoor Circle, we worked many long hours prettying up the place to the joy of Beatrice Burns, wife of the governor.”
The Garden Club also helped landscape the Bishop Museum, Mission House grounds, Lyon Arboretum, Hawaii Nature Center, Palama Settlement, Linekona School, Contemporary Museum and Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific.
The Garden Club identified and labeled the trees at Queen Emma Summer Palace and helped preserve trees at Iolani Palace. It developed the Diamond Head Nature Reserve and the Prehistoric Glen at Foster Botanical Garden.
By the 1970s yardmen were getting scarcer, and homeowners needed more knowledge and skills.
The Garden Club started “ABC’s of Gardening” at Foster Gardens with various experts lecturing to the general public.
Here are a few tips it has for home gardeners:
>> To prevent dirt from accumulating under your fingernails, draw your nails across a bar of soap. When done gardening, use a nail brush to remove soap and your nails will be sparkling clean!
>> When using a new fertilizer, use less at first to see how your plants tolerate it.
>> Add plants to your yard that attract butterflies and bees. We need them.
>> Line the bottom of your flowerpots with coffee filters to prevent the soil from washing out the holes.
>> Mulch to conserve water and control weeds.
The club also puts on flower shows. Nearly 3,000 attended its 1986 show at the Honolulu Museum of Art. More than 400 horticulture entries turned their courtyards into a garden. In 2015 over 5,000 attended the flower show “Shangri La.”
The club also has focused on conservation of limited island resources and saving Hawaii’s native plants.
In 1970 the “ABC’s of Gardening” classes moved to Lyon Arboretum and were renamed “Stepping Stones” classes. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser called it the “School of Green Thumbs.” The horticultural subjects are taught by knowledgeable Garden Club members and other experts from the community.
Stepping Stones classes continue today. At the end of September, a four-part series of classes will be held at Lyon Arboretum (contact it for more details).
For more than a decade, Garden Club members have been teaching inmates at the Women’s Community Correctional Center how to garden and have held monthly classes on floral design and even botanical jewelry.
“Our activities today focus on gardening, conservation, environmental protection, horticulture, floral design and civic improvement,” Boxold said, “to grow a more beautiful and sustainable world.”
For over 87 years the Garden Club of Honolulu has contributed its skills in growing, sowing and showing Hawaii’s tropical beauty. Hawaii is certainly a more beautiful place because of it.
Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@yahoo.com.
