Garden club nurtures flowers and friendship
Group of women turn pandemic hobbies into backyard passion projects
Ebony Goudeau fluffed the ruffled edges of napkins on a perfectly set dining table as Angela Hudson tended to the white hydrangeas, roses and lilies that filled the glass vases in the centerpieces.
The longtime friends were fussing over the outdoor dining table at their friend LaTonya Wright’s Manvel home before others in their Eight Seat Garden Club arrived.
For Goudeau, it was the culmination of weeks of preparation and spot checks on the landscaping and other details. For Wright, it was her turn in the garden club’s rotation of monthly garden parties in which the seven Black women gather to celebrate their friendship and their new hobby: gardening.
Like others across the country, these women took up gardening during the pandemic. Suddenly working from home, they found themselves staring into boring backyards. The February freeze made it worse, with Mother Nature killing much of what they had.
Though there are some vegetables and herbs in the mix, most of their new landscaping has entailed adding trees, flowering shrubs and potted flowers.
Goudeau, 43, is the glue in this group of seven — the eighth seat is for a single guest invited by the party hostess — bringing together clusters of friends as one happy whole. Her own gardening journey started with sprucing up the inside of her home, then turning her attention outdoors.
“My husband and I like living inside and outside. We like al fresco dining — we eat meals outside every day. We decided that’s how we’re going to live,” she said of the intentionality of life since the pandemic began.
Getting her hands in the soil and seeing the results in growing and blooming plants and trees has been a lesson in doing her homework and then simply learning through trial and error.
“It has been night and day. It has given me calm and peace in such a chaotic world, and every day is something new and different,” Goudeau said. “There might be murder and chaos and elections in the news, but my garden is my peaceful respite.”
She started with potted plants in her backyard, then a new pergola was the ideal spot for flowering vines. Friends saw her Facebook posts and left praise; then they started asking questions.
Goudeau, who works at San Jacinto College, encouraged her friends to start gardening and after a while decided it was time to see what everyone else was doing. She planned a backyard garden party and invited six of her friends and one guest, and the Eight Seat Garden Club was born.
A different group member hosts the party each month, and the event has grown to include spectacular fashion, catered dinners — this one by chef/caterer Javani King — and signature cocktails as the parties get
progressively more glam. They show off their gardens and landscaping and then they catch up on life and laughs.
Before the dinner began, Hudson, 48, the division director of communication at St. Luke’s Health, talked about how her increased interest in gardening lead to an even stronger passion for flower arranging.
“In the pandemic, everyone picked up a habit or a hobby,” said Hudson. “COVID was stressful. I would go to the market and pick up flowers and make arrangements. The more I did it, the more I wanted to learn about them.”
Before the pandemic, Hudson never slowed down long enough to consider a hobby.
“A garden forces you to be patient and grasp the beauty that comes in its own time,” she said, noting that her next step will be learning how to grow hydrangeas, snapdragons and Asiatic lilies, flowers she likes to use in arrangements.
Much of Wright’s backyard work has been a reaction to post-freeze cleanup. She lost bottle brush trees, bird of paradise bushes and oleanders and added hardier plants, such as Mexican petunias, Vitex, red sisters, crape myrtles and Texas sage, plus big pots of deep pink bougainvillea. And, despite that nearly every bottle brush died in the freeze, she replanted more of the trees for their brilliant red, fuzzy blooms.
“I appreciate the beauty of it all,” said Wright, 49, vice president of sales at Clarus, a Chicago-based pharmaceutical company. “But gardening is like being a cat owner. It will give back to you, but you have to work for it.”
Tejuana Edmond, 45, the head of refining catalysts for the Americas at BASF, travels frequently for work, so she wants her outdoor space to be a relaxing oasis — and one with unfussy plants that won’t wither when she’s gone.
She has added potted plants to her landscaping and hopes that her new citrus trees will one day produce fruit she can incorporate into her cooking.
Tanya Easter, 50, who also works in the gas and oil industry as a supply chain manager at Chevron, found herself with a sad view when she started working from home in early 2020. Goudeau’s gardening photos and advice arrived right on time.
“My home office looks out into the backyard, and it was very depressing,” Easter said of the small backyard at her innerLoop townhome. “It’s evolving, but that’s because it’s a small space.”
Her early efforts were wiped out by the freeze, but she rebounded with artificial grass and concrete tiles with plantings of crape myrtles and jasmine.
Nicole Walters, 47, dean of the Colby School of Innovation at the University of St. Thomas, wasn’t outdoorsy at all when she told her husband, a native of Jamaica, that she wanted to plant a garden.
Now they have a lemon tree plus a patch where they grow peppers, cucumbers and other vegetables and herbs.
And Queenie Wilkins, 38, an anesthesiologist at UTMB, said she’s working on the patience it takes to be a gardener.
When the February freeze killed things in her yard, she got busy. Since her knockout roses, sago palm and hibiscus plants all survived, she planted more of
those, plus some pretty bougainvillea and added new beds with bushes for structure and caladiums and coleus for color.
“I became an anesthesiologist because I like instant gratification. Gardening doesn’t work like that, you know?” Wilkins said to the amusement of her friends. “You have to baby it and I don’t have that kind of patience. It takes tons of patience.”