The Brantford Garden Club will be hosting its 169th annual summer flower show at the Lions Park arena auditorium on Saturday, July 27, 2024.
The club, which was founded back in 1852, currently has 258 members and is the oldest horticultural society in Ontario.
With the upcoming summer garden show, club members will enter a variety of annual and perennial plant specimens in over 100 classes.
From flowers to vegetables, special exhibits, design categories and more, Carol Sterkenburg, President of the Brantford Garden Club, said that visitors can expect to see over 60 horticulture specimens from A to Z (astilbe to zinnia) throughout their visit.
“This year we have 105 different classes, including design and youth categories, and our members will be picking the best specimens from their gardens and entering them into the competition,” she said. “We’ll have flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits, flowering shrubs and vines, outdoor plants and houseplants… the works really. Our members will bring everything in the morning between 9:30 and 11:15 a.m. and then at 11:30 a.m. our judges will go through everything that’s there before we open it to the public from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.”
Sterkenburg said that as far as the design competition goes, this year’s theme will centre around “Little Ditties from the Garden.”
“We have quite a few members that like to do design and so they’ll take a bunch of flowers from their garden and create a design out of it and enter it,” she said. “This year, the different design categories are based around nursery rhymes and their design has to reflect that category. For example, there’ll be a category that is ‘rub-a-dub-dub, three men and a tub’ so it has to be in a container that’s two thirds water, and then they’ll use fresh plant material and create something that reflects that nursery rhyme.”
The judges will present the trophies and awards to the members who have collected the most points from their entries, including the President’s award, youth awards, and various adult awards, as well.
Overall, Sterkenburg said that because the club’s objective is to encourage environmental protection and the love of horticulture, the show is a great place to cheer each other on while getting ideas for your own garden.
“There’s so many varieties of flowers there that while you’ll absolutely see things you may have in your own garden, you’re also going to see some that you’ve probably never seen or heard of before,” she said. “I know when I used to visit the summer garden show in the past, I would often look around and say ‘oh I’ve got those in my garden!’ and it really made me feel like an accomplished gardener, but it also gave me a great idea of things I wanted to add to my garden as well.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
