Club’s garden fest offers day in sun

After leaving construction when the economy dipped around 2008, Pat Wisdom had a plan to get back to building, but on a smaller scale.

The Geneva resident and her husband started a business that repurposes old wood to create birdhouses, bat houses and bird feeders.

“You could drive me up to a race car and I’d be able to turn it into a birdhouse,” she said.

“I woke up with the idea one day and I had the power tools to do it.”

Wisdom showed off some of her creations on Saturday at Garden Festival 2018, an Orlando Garden Club event.

She was one of about 30 vendors at the show, which was held at the club’s building behind the Orlando Science Center.

The events can attract new collectors and plant enthusiasts to the hobby, which is crucial if leaders want the club to continue educating people about flowers and gardening, said Octive Healey, the club’s president.

“It’s difficult to keep membership,” she said. “We need new members to get involved.”

The Orlando Garden Club has a long history in Central Florida, having joined the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs in 1927.

At its peak in the 1950s, membership swelled to include more than 400 enthusiasts.

That number now about 110.

“We had a limit on the number of members we could have back then,” said Katy Daniell, who at 93 is the longest-running member of the club.

The effort to attract younger audiences has become difficult because so many other activities, including browsing the Internet and playing on smartphones, compete with gardening for time, Daniell said.

Education about plants is also lacking, she said.

“They need to learn on their own because parents don’t teach them these things anymore,” she said. “We like to teach how to take care of the sits at things we granted.”

Georgia McCrory Orser, who runs the family-owned McCrory’s Sunny Hill Nursery in Eustis, said interest in garden clubs has been on the decline.

But the nursery has been trying to use social media for a more-modern approach to their business.

“We are on Facebook every day socializing in those ways,” Orser said. “I don’t think the love of plants is going away but maybe the clubs. It’s just a different time.” sometimes take for