The Garden Club: Members Lovingly Ensure the Good Stewardship of Our Parish Grounds

If you’ve walked around our parish grounds and noticed the beautiful flower beds, you can thank the parish’s Garden Club. Bringing a love for gardening and a desire to make the parish beautiful and inviting, dedicated parishioners have offered their time and their talent to cultivate the garden beds around the church. Lawrence Gradwell, who has been a lifelong gardener, coordinates the volunteers who work the flower beds. The Garden Club has been around for as long as he can remember, but Lawrence got involved about five years ago.

“Our parish is a stewardship parish,” Lawrence says. “We want people to feel welcome here and one way we can make things welcoming is if the grounds look nice and inviting and are a nice place to walk around.”

For the most part, each volunteer comes in on their own time to care for their flower beds. They take some time to clear away the detritus from the old season, care for the perennials, and plant new flowers. In the spring, Lawrence coordinates a large load of mulch, and the volunteers come to distribute it among the flower beds. Before Easter, the volunteers got together to clean up the parish grounds and ensure that things look welcoming for Easter weekend. On those big workdays, more volunteers often join to help spread mulch and trim bushes.

“We have some really highly motivated people,” Lawrence says. “It’s pretty much selfdirected and people take ownership of the areas they take care of.”

The Garden Club has at least a dozen regular members and five or six more who come out to help on group workdays. However, the Garden Club is expanding — some areas have been an afterthought in the past that Lawrence and the volunteers hope to start cultivating with more flowers.

The parishioners who volunteer, in conjunction with the dedicated maintenance staff who keep the grass neatly cut, have made our parish grounds beautiful and welcoming. Each volunteer has given their time and hard work to the community, along with a passion for gardening and an eye for a beautiful flowerbed. Simply walking onto the parish grounds is a witness to the love and care our parish family has. By working together, they’ve made a big task achievable.

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of time,” Lawrence says. “If you like to garden, take care of plants, or even trim bushes, and you have some time to do it, please get involved. We have something to do for just about anyone who wants to be involved.”

If you would like to help care for the parish gardens, whether on group workdays or on your own time, please contact Lawrence Gradwell at 440-942-6196 or gradwelll@asme-member.org.