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COMMENTARY
For men only, a garden club
grows in Buckhead
Allen Ferrell grew up on a ranch in Col
orado, so he knew his way around back
yard vegetable and flower gardens. But af
ter he settled in Georgia back in 2004, he
found that when it came to plants, some
things had changed.
“Coming from Colorado, the climate
is so different,” the 72 -year-old Ferrell
said. “I found out [that in Georgia], some
things you have to take a machete to.”
Like crepe myrtles, those colorful trees
that seem to sprout everywhere and that
some local gardeners prune nearly to
stumps every spring.
Or consider the difference, he said, in
growing impatiens. He’d always liked rais
ing the colorful little flowers. When he
lived in Denver, he had to nurture them,
replant them every year, fuss over them.
Here? They jump out of the ground.
“Here, they grow three times the height,”
he said. “We were amazed at the beds of
impatiens we had.”
Ferrell lives in a Buckhead condo
minium now, so he does much of his
gardening through the Buckhead Men’s
Garden Club, a 53-year-old organi
zation that claims 35 members and is
based at a greenhouse tucked away on
the property of the Atlanta History Cen
ter. Ferrell, president of the club, said
that back in the 1970s, the group had as
many as 140 members. ITe thinks mem
bership has fallen offbecause people just
don’t have as much time to garden as
they used to.
The club has one distinctive feature.
“As far as we know, we are the only men’s
garden club in Georgia,” he said. “Garden
clubs tend to be 95 percent women.”
So why did a men-only garden club
sprout in Buckhead? “I honestly don’t
know what caused a group of men to
band together, other than an interest in
gardening,” Ferrell said one recent sun
ny Saturday morning as he sat among
the Knock Out roses, asparagus and oth
er plants club members were growing at
the greenhouse. ITe thought a minute
more. “And they probably had very little
space to propagate plants.”
Not that members don’t garden at
home. Member Wheeler Bryan certain
ly does. ITe’s been tending a patch in the
backyard of his Buckhead home for 25-
plus years, he said. His wife, Anne, com
plains that his
vegetable gar
den some
times sprawls
into her flow
er garden.
Bryan,
who says he
learned gar
dening when
he was grow-
ing up in Tif-
ton in south
Georgia, now
grows toma
toes, squash,
eggplants, lots of varieties of
peppers and lettuce. Fie har
vests so much that his children
kid him that he’s a truck farm
er. “My two children, who are
now grown, learned to count
change by running a vegeta
ble stand in the front yard,”
he said. “I would make them
[spend half the proceeds to]
take us out to dinner. We al
ways went to Wendy’s or Burg
er King.”
The Bryans dropped by the
men’s club greenhouse on this
Saturday morning to see what
sort of plants the club was of-
fering during one of its periodic fund
raising sales. Members who garden at
the greenhouse must turn over half their
crop to the club. Some vegetables are
shared to be eaten. Other plants — be
gonias, azaleas — are sold to raise mon
ey to pay club bills. Anne Bryan bought
a begonia.
As he waited for customers to arrive,
Cal Crutchfield, who’s 64 and works at
Clayton State University, nibbled on
dried collard leaves.
He’d grown the greens in a small
plot next to the greenhouse and cooked
them to roughly the consistency of po
tato chips. He grows various greens, cab
bages, lettuce and others. “I grow sor
rel,” he said. “I like to make sorrel and
arugula salads because you get the salt
and pepper taste from the plants.”
He used to have trouble growing
vegetables at home, he said, because
his house faces south and his backyard
gets too little sun. Now he’s trying some
raised beds in his sunny front yard, he
said. Still, his cabbages and sorrel are
growing alongside the little greenhouse
that operates within sight of Buckhead’s
high rises. And he enjoys the club’s
meetings, where programs range from
a talk on lichens to descriptions of gar
dens that have been established any
where from South Carolina to England.
“It’s a good way to get out of the
house,” Crutchfield said. “We just have
a lot of fun and a lot of camaraderie. A
lot of us are older and need to do some
thing different.”
And, of course, find a place in the
city to tend to their cabbage crop.
JOE EARLE
Allen Ferell, left, president of the
Buckhead Men’s Garden Club, discusses
plants with member Cal Crutchfield.
AROUND
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