Gardening State: The Garden Club of Morristown

Since it was founded in 1913, the Garden Club of Morristown (GCM) has touched countless corners of town. It has planted bulbs on the Green and outside the library. Each holiday season, it makes floral arrangements and more than 40 wreaths to decorate town nonprofits. A few times each year, its members gather to make dozens of arrangements to help brighten the day for cancer patients at Morristown Medical Center. GCM helped local nonprofit Grow It Green put in a pollinator garden at its urban farm. For about 70 years, club members have headed to Macculloch Hall to help the museum prune its rosebushes and maintain its historic gardens. For many years, members also decorated the museum for the holidays. “Our members have a breadth of knowledge about the best way to care for gardens like those that we love to share,” says club President Michelle King.

The group also helped to restore Footes Pond Wood, the 24-acre park next to Thomas Jefferson Elementary School that was overrun with invasive plants. “We helped Friends of Footes Pond Wood secure nonprofit status, which helped us get them quite a few grants.” The once hard-to-use space now boasts a fishing dock, a trail that loops around the pond, and lots of herons, turtles, and other wildlife. In honor of a past garden club president, GCM underwrote and maintains Darby’s Garden, which, like the rest of Foote’s Pond Wood, only contains native plants.

JERSEY ROOTS

Along with its parent organization, the Garden Club of America, the GCM worked to make April Native Plant month in New Jersey. 

The Garden Club of America defines native plants as having “evolved over thousands of years in a specific geographic region, alongside local floral and fauna, without direct or indirect human intervention.” In New Jersey, examples include black-eyed Susans, cone flowers, swamp milkweed, and oak trees.

For a slew of reasons, native plants are the backbone of healthy ecosystems. They are well adapted to the local environment and generally have deep root systems that help prevent soil erosion and enable plants to thrive with less water. In addition, native plants typically require fewer chemicals, like fertilizers and pesticides, than non-native plants. 

Then there are the pollinators. “Native plants attract pollinators,” King says. “Without native plants, we’re losing our bee populations. We’re losing our bird populations.”  This is crucial because, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 35% of the world’s food crops—including apples, coffee, and strawberries—need animal pollinators to reproduce. 

ADVOCACY AND SUSTAINABILITY

In March, the club sent three delegates to the GCA National Affairs & Legislation conference in Washington D.C., where club members met with a mix of senators and representatives, from both sides of the aisle, to advocate for sustainability and environmental issues. 

More locally, the club is fighting to bring food composting programs to Morris County. King points to the “very successful” food composting program in Princeton as an example. 

“Ideally, we’d like to see collection at the curb to make it easy for people, but right now we’re talking about drop off locations,” she says. Benefits of food composting, according to the garden club, include reducing the waste sent to landfills, which reduces menthane and other greenhouse gas emissions. “It helps so much if the town knows this is something people want,” King says, urging residents to contact local officials to indicate their interest in the program. 

“We have long-reaching arms in the Morristown area,” King says. “We offer education, advocate for the environment, and support community projects. We are a garden club that’s about more than gardening.”

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Shop Local

Native plants are a cornerstone of the Garden Club of Morristown’s annual plant sale, where expert gardeners wearing “Go Native” badges will be on hand to answer all your questions. As an added bonus, all plants will be arranged in user-friendly categories, such as prefers shade, likes partial sun, and deer resistant. “All the money raised goes right back into community programs,” says club President Michelle King. Find native New Jersey plants like these—and more—on May 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. (New Vernon Fire House, 22 Village Rd., New Vernon;  gardenclubofmorristown.org)

• Tall Anemone (Anemone virginiana) has white flowers on tall stalks, prefers partial shade, and is great for planting in large groups in a native perennial garden. 

• Eastern Columbine (Aquiligea canadensis) features drooping red-and-yellow flowers that bloom April through May. 

• Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) has bright orange flowers that grow from June to August in flat-topped clusters. Caterpillars love this plant, named for the fact that it contains substances toxic to butterfly predators, like birds. 

• Blue Wild Indigo (Baptisia australis) is a tall, bushy perennial with purple flowers. Traditionally used to make natural dye, it prefers full sun and looks great planted at the back of borders. 

• Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata) grows from two- to four-feet tall, has fluffy purple flowers, loves full sun, and provides great food for bees.