At first I thought, “What could be wrong with it?” Annie loves flower arranging and is good at it, why shouldn’t she join a group of ladies with a similar interest? What could be the downside of signing up with a couple and hanging with fellow flower fans?
What I discovered is that garden clubs are like crack cocaine. You try a little bit and before you know it you’re hooked. In no time the garage is jammed with tables covered with greenery, containers, hunks of driftwood and a million other bits and pieces of flower arranging detritus. Flowers are flying in from Florida and boxes of containers and Oasis arrive from Amazon. You have to perform an acrobatic ballet to get from the car into the house.
“I’ll clean it up after the Daffodil Show,” she promises. But then comes the Lily Show, then the presentation to the club in Norfolk followed by the one in Winchester. Instead of getting cleaner, the garage turns into an obstacle course. One false move and after tripping over a hidden flower bucket you’re flat on your keyster.
“I know it’s a mess but I just have to get through these next three shows and then I’ll get to it. And by the way, I have a delivery coming tomorrow with a bunch of stuff I’ve ordered and I’m going to be up in Orange so could you take care of it for me?”
The delivery turns out to be seven five-foot long boxes that have to be hustled in from the cold, opened and the flowers have to be “processed”. Processing is like a booster rocket for flowers, dousing them in water and adding a couple jiggers of plant food to restore them to their original condition.
So I’m impressed into the garden club as a temporary guest worker, opening the seven boxes, unpacking the flowers, unwrapping them, making fresh cuts in all the stems, stripping off excess foliage and immersing them in water sweetened with flower preservative.
As I’m processing, it occurs to me that all these flowers were packed up by migrant workers who take home maybe seven dollars a day—I’m unpacking the same stuff so what does that make me?
It takes me an hour and a half and I don’t even see the measly seven bucks. And when she gets home, invariably I get the remarks,
“You cut these too short.”
“You left too many leaves on.”
“These need to be in a bigger container.”
I want to say, “That’s what happens when you hire unskilled labor,” but I know better. Instead I grin and bear it.
When the garden club comes over for cocktails, guess who turns into the butler/bartender? And when she forgets something critical for one of her lectures, guess who turns into delivery boy? That’s okay, I only write for three hours a day, I have plenty of time to do menial work.
Let’s not even talk about when Annie does an arrangement and calls to me, “Will you come here, there’s something I want you to look at.” Carefully making my way through the garage minefield, I see my wife standing in front of a half-finished arrangement. “Does this look too representational? It’s supposed to be abstract,” she asks. Demurring does no good, “C’mon, I need your help, please tell me what you think.” So with no other choice, you step right in it.
Now here’s where the ice gets really thin for a garden club guest worker. Because if she takes your advice and doesn’t bring home a blue, you’re getting some of the blame. “I shouldn’t have listened to you,” is what you get. “I knew it was too representational right from the start but I let you talk me into it.”
But it gets worse. From crack cocaine, addicts often go on to heroin. It’s the same with garden clubbers. They take the leap from doing flower shows to putting on Garden Week. Annie got dragooned into being deputy-dog this year.
It’s like a military campaign. All across Virginia, thousands of garden clubbers mobilize to put on a week of house and garden tours across the state. It’s an 11 million dollar operation and it takes regular army to pull it off. Chief-of-Staff, generals, colonels, captains, lieutenants and thousands of grunts. Annie is a captain reporting to Colonel Catherine.
The campaign begins a year before when Google Docs start flying and they begin reporting to Richmond on a regular basis. As Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, it’s now the nerve center of the Garden Week campaign.
“I’m going to Richmond tomorrow for a meeting,” is what I hear a couple times a week. Annie’s target is Culpeper. So if she’s not off to Richmond, she’s in Culpeper.
A year ago, they sweet-talked a bunch of poor suckers into putting their farms on the tour. In late winter, their properties get invaded by the army. They make plans to station women in each house as guides, assign teams to do multiple flower arrangements, recruit car parkers, hire buses and port-a-potties, make arrangements for food and drinks. As you can imagine, our phone rings off the hook and emails pile up on Annie’s computer.
“I must get fifty a day,” she tells me as her fingers tap, tap, tap, on her phone. So even though my wife is home, she’s really not because she’s got her nose in her iPhone 24-7. If I have something to say to her, I have to book the time to talk.
And then there are the crises when she makes a mad dash to the car, screams down the drive and speeds to Colonel Catherine’s for an emergency meeting.
If I try to tell her she’s taking everything too seriously and needs to step back and get some perspective, I get, “You just don’t get it, do you? This is a tremendous undertaking and we have a million things to do. So you just better get with the program, okay?”
Oh well, after Garden week is over maybe I can divorce the garden club and see if I can remarry my wife.