Oak Hills Garden Club continues to thrive
Members of the Oak Hills Garden Club gathered last week to celebrate the past and plan for the future.
Its April 19 meeting in Eva’s Tee House on the Aubrey’s Dubbs Dred Golf Course, 140 Aubrey Drive, both celebrated the club’s 80th anniversary and served as a planning session for the club’s upcoming June 3 spring plant show at Tanglewood Center, 10 Austin Ave., Lyndora.
According to the club’s history, it was formed on Nov. 10, 1943, when nine women met to talk about gardening. Before the group adjourned, the Oak Hills Garden Club had formed and set out its mission: to stimulate the knowledge and love of gardening, share the advantages of association through conference and correspondence, aid in the protection of native plants and birds, and encourage civic planting.
The club has met continuously on the third Wednesday of each month in various locations ever since, and today is made up of 23 women who continue the club’s original purpose.
One of those members is Cindy Chupka, of Butler, who started attending club meetings in 1952 as a 2-year-old in the lap of her mother, Pearl Langham.
“I’ve been a member for 43 years. I joined in 1979,” Chupka said. “I joined for all the girls, of course, and we do a lot of trips. We have speakers and activities like this. This has always been a very social club.”
“I’m the oldest member that can attend,” Chupka added. “We have two other members who can’t come any more. ”
Chupka said the main mission of the club remains education for gardeners and giving back to the community.
That’s the purpose of the club’s annual plant sale, said Marilyn Rogerson, of Gibsonia, who is in charge of the event this year, which is the club’s only fundraiser.
She said the plant sale will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. June 3 at Tanglewood Center, and it also will feature a basket raffle.
She said the club has been staging the plant sale for a long time.
“We have plants from our own gardens,” Rogerson said. “If they can make it though the winter in our gardens, they will make it through the winter in yours.”
“It’s very, very, very productive,” Elaine Prowel, of Butler, said of the sale.
“The sale comes when it’s time to divide things in the garden. It’s a good way to get rid of them,” Prowel said.
“It’s 95% perennials, although a few bring tomatoes. They’re going to come back every year,” Rogerson said.
The good thing about the plants is they are adapted to conditions in Western Pennsylvania, she said, “You don’t know where the plants in the big box stores come from.”
Money from the fundraiser goes toward planting projects such as the one last year at Doughboy Park in Butler, and donations to programs such as adult literacy at Butler County Community College and the greenhouse at the VA Hospital.
Club member Monica Huselton is a volunteer of another recipient of a club donation last year, Growing Together Aquaponics Program.
“It’s a facility in Slippery Rock that grows tomatoes, lettuce and fish,” said Huselton.
“They train people on the autistic spectrum. They raise fish and plants. The plants clear the water for the fish and the fish waste feeds the plants,” she added.
Rogerson said the club’s BC3 Endowment Scholarship also received a $500 donation in 2022.
Prowel said local businesses and greenhouses donate plants and merchandise that make up the contents of the raffle baskets.
Rogerson said the club had grown the scholarship into a $35,000 endowment. Part of it goes annually to a BC3 student who has 3.0 minimum GPA, is enrolled at least part time as a parks and recreation general option major or a future horticulture program major, and who provides a three-paragraph essay describing how the student will use his or her education.
