Garden Club beautifies Sisters

Since 1988, the Sisters Garden Club has been making Sisters a more beautiful place to live. Actually, beautifying the community is only one of its goals.

Promoting public interest and education in Central Oregon gardening are among the Garden Club's top priorities, along with fostering a general understanding of land stewardship.

Garden Club members (l-r) Nancy Uppendahl, Lorena Bliven, Mickey Duehren, Juanita Rice and Cathy Ehlers work on the welcoming portal to Sisters.

The group's major public event and fund-raiser, the Quilt Show Garden Tour, was just completed and was a big success.

However (not letting any grass grow under their feet) the members were busy last week weeding and sprucing up their floral displays around town.

The Club maintains four separate garden areas: the log cabin site adjacent to Espresso Junction, "The Point" where Hood Avenue joins Cascade Avenue at the east end of town, the library grounds, and the gardens surrounding the gazebo on the Village Green.

When The Nugget caught up with the gardening ladies last week, they were perfecting an already glorious floral display surrounding the old log cabin and the "Welcome to Sisters" sign.

The club's plantings favor perennials -- flowers that persist from year to year. Favorites include lupine, holly hock, delphiniums, and lilies, as well as petunias, pansies and poppies.

The club makes it a point to feature flowers that do well in Central Oregon.

Garden Club member Lorena Bliven is in charge of the log cabin garden site, which was established about five years ago.

"I have a crew of eight members who come and work to help maintain this area," she said. She also said that Espresso Junction always makes it a point to give the ladies complimentary latt÷s when they work at the location.

Club President Cathy Ehlers also praised Lutton's Hardware for donating broken bags of fertilizer and mulch to the club projects.

In addition to heading up the club, Ehlers has personal responsibility for The Point, just across Hood Avenue from the log cabin.

"I think a lot of people join the Garden Club because they want to learn about gardening in Central Oregon," Ehlers said. "When I first moved up here from The Valley, all my plants lasted about two weeks."

A permanent resident of the area since 1995, she and her husband, Ken, became regular visitors to Sisters when they found vacations aboard a boat too confining.

"People asked me if we might ever move here permanently," she said, "but I told them 'Oh, no. I'm a big-city girl; I like the symphony and all that.'

"But one day, Ken and I were up here; and, when it came time to go home on Sunday, we realized that we didn't want to go."

As a result, they decided to pack up and move to Sisters full-time.

The Garden Club annually budgets about $500 for each of the four gardens, but shifts resources among them as the need arises.

The club also has donated funds to SOAR and to the Sisters High School greenhouse program.

"The high school greenhouse is really important to us," said Ehlers, "because they have a wetlands restoration program. It's part of our by-laws to encourage stewardship of the planet Earth."

The Quilt Show Garden Tour has made a big difference for the club.

"Jean Wells started it up," said Ehlers, referring to the Quilt Show's founder. "She wanted to have a field trip for the ladies taking quilting classes so they could see what gardening is like in Central Oregon."

Ehlers went on to explain that Wells even sells the tickets for the club.

"By the time the quilting classes are full," Ehlers said, "all 400 tickets for our garden tour are sold out; and we get to keep almost the entire proceeds."

Not wanting to rest on their laurels -- or their petunias, for that matter -- the Garden Club is looking for more members, especially some who would actually work in the gardens.

And, like the Marines, they're looking for a few good men.

When the club first started 13 years ago, several men were listed on the rolls.

There are none today.