America's First Green Girls: Bedford Garden Club Centennial 1911-2011

This history is courtesy of the Bedford Garden Club. An exciting day of celebration events is planned for June 4 at John Jay Homestead—click here for details and look for coverage of the day on Patch next week.

For 100 years, Bedford Garden Club members have been called eco-pioneers, tree-huggers, troublemakers, compost crusaders and wildflower warriors.

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But never shrinking violets. 

They came, they saw, they helped kick-start American conservationism. A full 2 years before the ground-breaking national Garden Club of America was founded in 1913, the Bedford Garden Club took root in the pre-Revolutionary Westchester town that bears its name. 

This year, 2011, marks their Centennial: 100 years of encouraging civic planting, aiding in the protection of native plants and birds and stimulating the knowledge and love of gardening.

“In those very early years of the 20th century, the Garden Club was a nexus of revolutionary environmental activism led by well-educated, worldly, willful women,” says current Bedford Garden Club president Mimi Lines. “Which is pretty impressive considering women didn’t have the right to vote yet.”

In 2009, the Bedford Garden Club co-sponsored the Bedford Environmental Summit, a full day of education on pressing environmental issues that attracted over 1000 participants and led to The Town of Bedford passing a Climate Action Plan with a goal of 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.  A nonprofit organization Bedford 2020, created to assist with implementation of the Plan, was launched at the Bedford Environmental Action Day on January 28, 2011. The Club’s efforts continue with two ongoing projects:

Branch Out: Planting Trees for Bedford’s Next Generation which aims to plant 2020 trees in private and public spaces by the year 2020, and the funding of the local Title 1 Mt. Kisco Elementary School Vegetable Garden Project, which incorporates vegetables and flowers into the school’s curriculum.

Seeds of Change  Like the celebrated 600 year old Bedford Oak, the Bedford Garden Club has unshakably deep roots in the town. Among its founding members were EIeanor Jay Iselin, great, great
granddaughter of America’s first Chief Justice John Jay, a native New Yorker who’d built his country estate in Bedford (now the historic landmark the John Jay Homestead) Like fellow Founding Fathers Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, Jay believed tending the soil was a mark of noble citizenship, rooted in the love of liberty. Gardening was a family tradition and patriotic duty, taken up with gusto by Eleanor and those earlymembers of the Bedford Garden Club.

Floral Majority 

Several early BGC members hailed from such prominent American families as Scribner, Weir, Goodrich, Fairchild ,Frick, Kellogg, van Cortlandt, Wainwright, and Van Rensselaer; they were wives
and daughters of prominent men who used their position of privilege to appeal to powerful people in politics and publishing to champion the cause of conservation. 

“Women are naturally the nurturers, preservers and producers of life, and tend to be philosophical and fiercely protective of the Earth which their progeny will inherit,” says Lines. “From the beginning our members were uninhibited about marching their environmental
concerns straight to the government on both local and federal levels.”  This ethic carries forward today as Garden Club of America women representing their National Affairs and Legislation committees descend on Washington, D.C. to lobby Congressmen and women in support of environmental legislation effected by budget cuts.

Fertile imaginations 

Among the trailblazers of the Bedford Garden Club:

• Delia Marble (daughter ofManton Marble, owner of the highly influential daily New York World) who, while president of the BGC (1917-1919), also served as the chairman of the GCA’s Women’s Land Army of World War I. Taking the place of young men off to war, young female “farmerettes” - sporting  then-shocking overalls - tirelessly plowed, planted, and harvested the land - frequently on Marble’s own Bedford Farm. Marble’s Bedford-based Agricultural Camp served as the model for the full national movement of the Women’s Land Army.
• Eloise Luquer (President 1933-35) wrote and illustrated botanical notebooks for the inmates of Bedford Women’s State prison as far back as 1938, sowing the seeds for what would become the prison’s much-acclaimed Friendship Garden, the first such community effort to  improve the lives of female prison inmates. Luquer’s passion was the preservation of American native wildflowers - vital players in the ecosystem - and her sensitively rendered watercolors hang in many private collections and public ones, including the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Also during the Thirties, fellow member Mrs. Rector Fox of the Billboard Committee once made such a nuisance of herself in an attempt to regulate signs on the highways that two representatives of the General Outdoor Advertising Company came up to her twice “to beg her to be quiet”.
• In 1942 Club members threw themselves enthusiastically into the task of growing, conserving and disseminating food during the War, donating mobile kitchens and canning units from local Bedford farms and properties. During the tenure of President Mrs. Edwin De T. Bechtel, they produced an astounding 55 tons of vegetables out of the Club’s Tool Shed Farm. 
• Wilhelmine “Willy” Kirby Waller, BGC member who served as president of the national Garden Club of America (1965—1968), campaigned against the use of DDTs and chlorinated hydrocarbons, a full 5 years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She also testified before Congress on the issue of preventing the proliferation of billboards along US highways, and served on the Conservation Advisory Committee under Presidents Nixon, Ford and George H W Bush.

Rooted in Beauty

BGC club members never forsake their founding principle of preserving nature in all its glory and promoting it through the planting, conservation and cultivation of spectacular gardens!

From the revival and maintenance of the historical Sundial Garden at the John Jay Homestead and plantings around the colonial-era Bedford Courthouse to the Alice Anderson Memorial Terrace at Northern Westchester Hospital,  there are also much-documented private gardens created for and by BGC members, namely at the Clark House on Bedford Center Road,  originally owned by a BGC President Mrs. Nelson Williams, with gardens designed by the celebrated landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand, whose most famous work is perhaps Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC ; there was also Villa Diana whose 1920s  garden was initiated by BGC member Mrs. T Whitney Blake and named for her granddaughter Diana Vreeland, famous fashion editor, who lived in the house for many years.

For more information, please contact Joyce Corrigan, Communications Coordinator BGC, at jccorrigan@aol.com