Every year, the Cottage Gardeners of Marblehead and Swampscott prep for their Mother’s Day Plant Sale, dedicating their time and effort to making the gardens of Marblehead beautiful.
Co-chairs of the sale, Colleen Connor and Betty Londergan, took up the work, leading the group through the sale.
“I’ve been a member for approximately five years, and I became chair, only of the plant sale, and this is my second year,” Connor said.
Connor and Londergan’s duties as plant sale co-chairs will end this year, as it is only a two-year term. Connor has been a member of the club for five years, and Londergan has been a member for four.
“My involvement has been as a member, and then the garden plant sale, which is a huge undertaking. We have a committee that starts meeting in January or February. Betty and I start meeting a little bit before that. We come up with creative ideas first and start to brainstorm on whether we want to try something new,” she said.
One of these new ideas emerged last year when the group created hydrangeas in a hat that could also be worn afterward.
“We put little ribbons around the bands that had sort of a garden theme, and we got hydrangeas that weren’t very expensive, and we put them in the hats. Some people even started wearing the hats at the plant sale,” Connor said with a laugh.
Connor gave credit to Londergan for her creative ideas, one being premade gardens last year.
“People who don’t have gardens. They might have a step, or they have a balcony, or maybe a wall next to their house that’s outdoors. Betty went out and bought these plants, and we disassembled a lot of them, and replanted them with other things we thought might look better, with some perennials if they maybe also wanted to plant them in their yard,” she explained.
The premade gardens came back again this year, with the group having around 100 containers.
“My favorite part of it was that I like doing the herbs. I grew herbs from seed and we made kitchen gardens, Something you could put on your windowsill inside your kitchen window and it would have three herbs in it, something to cook with.”
Londergan noted that one of her favorite item sold at the sale were the plants in tea cups.
“We had all these people looking for and finding and donating old, really beautiful tea cups, and then just filling them with violas and wrapping them really pretty,” she said.
Connor also mentioned how the group recycles all of their containers, going to places like the dump and nurseries. They also go to places like Market Basket for boxes so that people can carry their plants out.
“We have a whole long outline about what needs to be done, and we only have two meetings with the whole committee, and we try to make the meetings fun and short. We don’t want anyone to be there who’s not enjoying themselves,” she said.
This year was a bit more complicated due to the rain that wouldn’t stop falling on their set-up day.
“It poured. It was a deluge. It started raining Friday, and that’s when we set up. It rained all the way through the sale, and we had to keep reinventing the sale and how we were going to do it. We usually do things on tables, but it wasn’t going to work. We had a tent, but it wasn’t big enough for all of the tables,” she said.
Connor said that she was astounded by two things this year: the number of people that showed up and the work that the club did that day.
“I am so proud of our club because Friday night when we do set up, the cars started to show up and all of these women, and some of them are in their 90s, husbands are driving the car and they back up to where we had all of out plants and they pop open their trunks and they had some of the most beautiful healthy large plants that I think they dug up,” she said. “They weren’t purchased. And they just kept coming. I didn’t expect even our own members to show up in this kind of weather.”
Londergen was in complete agreement, mentioning the serious rainstorm that took over on Friday.
“We have a lot of older members as well as some younger more spry people, but everybody showed up and they came and they worked Friday to set up the whole sale. They worked in an absolute deluge, and it was freezing cold,” she said.
Connor called the women fierce for the work that they did that day, saying, “Some of these women have been friends for 30 years, and they’ve all lost their husbands, and they all go on vacations together to Europe and tour other gardens together… They’re each other’s support system.”
Londergan noted that everyone pitches in and brings a great attitude, which was the best part of the sale.
“It is a ton of work. My husband always says, ‘Just give me the checkbook; I’ll write the check for the whole whatever we raise,’ but it’s satisfying and it’s fun. Anytime you do an undertaking like that, you bond with people,” she said.
Londergan also spoke on how the club has to tend to the gardens around town as well.
“It’s challenging. You have to take a week in the summer at each of the places and there’s a really big clean-up in the spring and then another big one in the fall… There’s a lot of maintenance, and it’s always fun,” she said. “You get to know people in a way that’s organic.”
