A Personal History of GrowFest
By Karen Kahle, CGC Executive Director
There are a million individual stories woven into our 80-year history, connecting the CGC to the countless people who have attended our classes, fed their families with the bounty from a community garden, planted a native tree at a workday in the woods or volunteered to tend our beautiful grounds.
This week some people are writing new stories about volunteering for the first time while others will be adding another chapter to their long-running tale of support for the CGC’s annual rite of spring, now called GrowFest.
My own story about this plant sale began more than twenty years ago when a friend invited me to join her one Saturday for what she promised would be an eye-opening and expensive outing. I had just bought my first home and the yard around it was a wreck. I had torn down a falling down garage and ripped out a rotten half-finished deck, and I was desperate to get some plants growing in these unsightly spaces. My friend was right: I found an amazing selection of plants and incredibly knowledgeable people who gave me great advice about those plants, and I did indeed go home considerably poorer. I no longer own that home but still walk by it on occasion. Some of the phlox, columbine, peonies and day lilies that I bought that day are still going strong.
Little did I know when I started coming to the plant sale that I would someday be part of the CGC. I joined the staff here in the winter of 2017 as its resource development director. Shortly after I started, planning for THE Plant Sale—as it was affectionately called then—got underway. I quickly discovered just what a gargantuan undertaking it was, with so many moving parts and a task list a mile long. I also realized that an event of this scale would be impossible to pull off without the support of a cadre of dedicated veteran volunteers—and a gang of new ones, too.
The plant sale had a reputation for having the most diverse and eclectic offering of plants to be found anywhere in the region, so there was the scramble to get plant orders in to nurseries and the anxious waiting to see if the orders could be fully filled. It was critical to the success of the sale that we maintain its reputation!
There was the recruitment of outside vendors and the wrangling of bakers for the bake sale and the mad dash to get all the plant signs and tags made for those thousands of interesting plants. Then there was the work on Hauck Botanic Garden to get the grounds looking gorgeous for the hundreds of people that would be coming through the sale.
The other discovery was how the event, despite careful planning and preparation, was at the mercy of the weather! It takes almost the entire week to set up the sale, and it’s a rain-or-shine event. That week in 2017 happened to be quite miserable—most days were overcast and chilly, and it was so cold and rainy on Friday that many people stayed home from the Preview Party despite paying a generous price for their ticket.
As fate would have it, I missed the party and the sale on Saturday, too, because I got the dreaded phone call in the middle of the night that my mom had died unexpectedly. I remember driving up north to my parents’ home in the pouring rain feeling devastated about my mom but also feeling terrible that I was going to miss the event. I hated the idea of letting those around me down—a level of guilt that made no sense in that situation but is probably attributable to my Catholic upbringing!
I’ve been fortunate to be around for the seven plant sales since that fateful night in 2017, and every year I am reminded that my love of nature, of plants and flowers and gardening, started with my mom and her mother on their family farm in northwest Ohio. Those two women were as reliable and hardy and tough as nails as the perennial plants I bought at my very first plant sale. I often think, too, how my mom would have loved GrowFest had she lived to make it to the event. She would have been there, rain or shine. We hope you will be, too!