Our Stories
Club Flower.
On June 27, 1935 at a Garden Club meeting members voted on the Mountain Laurel, Kalmia latifolia, as club flower and each member received one.
Medfield Garden Club Slogan
“He who would reap well, must sow well.”
Anniversary Quilt.
On October 14, 1981, MGC members voted to make a quilt as a 50th anniversary project. The design for the quilt consisted of 10” appliqué and embroidered squares of rhododendrons representing the Medfield Rhododendron Swamp; mountain laurel, the club’s flower; herbs from Mrs. Ruth Allen’s herb book, illustrated by Hope Day (both members of the Medfield Garden Club); flowers from the MGC’s civic plantings around town; and in the center, the Liberty Tree at the Town House, Ulmus carpinifolia, planted by the club in 1976 for the 325th anniversary of Medfield.
85th Anniversary.
We celebrated our 85th anniversary in 2018 with the Fairbanks Garden Club at the 1636 Fairbanks House in Dedham with Fairbanks House tours, historic games, creative garden hats and a summer buffet filled with 1930s recipes.
Idella Cole Hussey founded the Medfield Garden Club on June 21, 1933. Idella was a Fairbanks. Her maternal grandmother was Eliza Fairbanks a descendant of George Fairbanks (second son of Johnathan and Grace, the builders of the house).
That summer, on August 16, 1933, Idella took the original ten founders of the Medfield Garden Club, Edna Huebner, Myra Leighton, Kate Tucker, Mary and Nettie Hamant, Beatrice Bangs, Lillian Kingsbury, Olive Spender, Grace Bridge, and Idella’s mother, Abbie Turner Cole, to the Fairbanks House for a summer picnic and outing. Our anniversary picnic was a commemoration of the gift of those original ten Medfield women, a garden club, created at the height of the Depression, that has survived, flourished and beautified the community for more than eighty-five years.