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Carrboro Community Garden wreath

2007 December 6

By Ken Moore
Flora Columnist

For 20 years, the holiday greenery that has adorned the columns of Carrboro’s Town Hall has been the result of the time and creativity of members of the Carrboro Community Garden Club.

Now, this group of gardeners is not your typical garden club organization. It does not belong to a Garden Club Council. It does not collect dues. A hat is passed around if the group needs a few dollars. It does not have any official elected officers, though several individuals voluntarily perform essential functions to keep the group loosely organized. Members meet monthly at members’ homes, where they enjoy walking about one another’s gardens, discovering new plants and gardening ideas. All learn from members freely sharing growing wisdoms and experiences. These monthly gatherings have also become a rather serendipitous gourmet feast of members sharing food and treats. There are meeting agendas, but they are frequently altered on the spot to meet the immediate interests of the members. Typically everyone enjoys talking at once and, amazingly, some rather remarkable things get planned and executed.

The group has three ongoing projects in the Carrboro community.

They plant and weed and hand water the wild garden along the Frances Shetley Bikeway. To many strollers, that stretch of wild brambles may look forsaken. But other strollers who may encounter one or more of the gardeners crawling around planting and weeding will stop and voice thanks for that wild patch where something is always flowering or fruiting or otherwise providing food and cover for birds and butterflies and other wild critters.

The group has participated for years in the community’s annual Carrboro Day, providing gardening information and plant identification and distributing free plants dug from the gardens of members and from community citizens who bring their own extra plants to share and swap on that first Sunday in May.

The third project is the annual holiday decorating of the Carrboro Town Hall. In the early years, the group created holly and pine swags with red bows for the four columns and wrapped the front railing with garlands of similar greenery. Then about ten years ago, a giant plywood cutout circle, rescued from the landfill, became a frame for a giant wreath to hang over the entrance. Now the hanging of this giant wreath has become an annual tradition accompanied by the placing of four smaller wreaths on the four columns.

Over the years, the group has committed itself to utilizing only native materials and the results are not your ordinary holiday wreath. The group generally relies on local cedar and pine and magnolia for the base, but you can count on some infrequently used materials, like sumac cones, broom sedge and cattails for accents.

This year the wreath goes up at 10 a.m. Friday morning. You are welcome to join in on the excitement of observing members of the Town’s Public Works Landscape and Grounds Division hoisting that giant wreath into the air while members of the Carrboro Community Garden Club hang the smaller wreaths. I suspect there will be some surprises on those wreaths again this year.

Email Ken Moore at flora@carrborocitizen.com. Find previous Ken Moore Citizen columns at The Annotated Flora (carrborocitizen.com/flora).

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