Garden Club’s Holiday Greens Event Will Offer More Than Plantings

By Shannon Hicks

The Garden Club of Newtown will hold its annual Holiday Greens Sale on Saturday, December 2, from 9 am to 3 pm. The sale will be at Newtown Meeting House, 31 Main Street in Newtown (at the flagpole).

Members have been creating many hand-crafted items including grapevine and evergreen wreaths, swags, topiaries and kissing balls, all of which will be offered for sale Saturday. In fact, the club took over two of the meeting rooms of Newtown’s churches this week just to prepare for Saturday’s big event. On Wednesday, the ladies were at the parish house of St Rose of Lima for a number of hours, and then moved to the lower meeting room of Newtown United Methodist Church on Thursday and Friday to put together a number of the items for the sale.

New this year will be Colonial fruit door decorations and special designs for mailboxes, all created by garden club members.

Small potted Alberta spruce trees will be offered. They can be used as table decorations now and replanted later. Live poinsettias in pots and baskets will also be presented during the sale for the first time this year.

“This year hopefully this event will be even more special than ever,” sale co-chairman Jo-Ann Scebold commented Wednesday morning. “We’re trying a few new things, and just looking forward to this, our largest fundraiser of the year.”

Proceeds from the event help the garden club with its community projects. Part of the proceeds will go to Newtown Scholarship Fund, to be given to a student in June who plans to study horticulture or a similar field. Other profits will help the club with its upkeep of the butterfly garden it installed earlier this year at Newtown Senior Center, or the ongoing maintenance of gardens it also cares for at Newtown United Methodist Church and Matthew Curtiss House-Museum, for instance.

Paula Stephan, the second co-chair of this year’s event, “has been a huge help in pulling everything together,” Mrs Scebold added. After each day’s work was completed, all of the projects were moved into the garage space at Mrs Stephan’s home for temporary storage.

Another special feature of the Garden Club Holiday Sale will be a raffle of a large papier maché Santa figure made by club co-president Kay Cochrane.

A long-time member of the garden club and a resident of Newtown for over 20 years, Mrs Cochrane has in the past donated similar figures, but on a smaller scale, to be sold during the club’s holiday event. This is the first time a Cochrane sculpture will be raffled.

Residents may remember the exhibit of Mrs Cochrane’s sculpture at C.H. Booth Library early last year. A menagerie of papier maché animals was put on exhibit in the ground floor of the library near the children’s department in the weeks leading up to Easter. She has also been selling her sculpture at the Brookfield Craft Center Holiday Show & Sale for a few years.

A self-taught artist, Mrs Cochrane has been creating papier maché art objects for 35 years. While some papier mache artists use wire and other materials in addition to paper, Mrs Cochrane told The Bee during a 1999 interview she only uses “wads of newspaper” to make her creations.

“I make my own glue of water and flour,” she added. After the figures are formed, she decorates them with acrylic paints. Mrs Cochrane is an award-winning painter in oils and a member of the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown; it is the artistic touch she adds to the sculpture with simple recipes that make her works so delightful.

The Santa figure being raffled this weekend has been displayed for a few weeks at C.H. Booth Library. On December 2, it will be moved to Newtown Meeting House, where the public will be able to view for one last time in the hours leading up to the raffle drawing.

Raffle tickets will be sold during the run of the sale. Tickets are $1 each, or six for $5. First Selectman Herb Rosenthal will draw the winning ticket around 2 pm.

Garden Author

Sydney Eddison, Too

Newtown resident, author, lecturer and garden expert Sydney Eddison will be the special guest of this year’s sale. Ms Eddison will autograph copies of her 1997 release The Self-Taught Gardener from 10 am to noon.

Ms Eddison is a frequent writer for Fine Gardening, Horticulture and many other publications. She is the author of five books on various gardening subjects and is currently working on her sixth release. She and her husband Martin has been living at the end of Echo Valley Road — just within the property lines of Upper Paugussett State Forest — and cultivating gorgeous gardens at the property for 40 years.

The Self-Taught Gardener: Lessons from A Country Garden was released in 1997. Like her previous releases, the book was praised for its common-sense approach to gardening and the comfortable, appealing way Ms Eddison wrote. Her “neighborly, over-the-fence manner,” as one editor describes Ms Eddison’s writing style, is inviting to gardeners and readers alike.

Country Living Gardener wrote, “Ms Eddison demystifies her subject, encouraging even the most timid neophyte to pick up the trowel.”