Expect a Difference
Beautiful Blooms
August 18, 2023
The Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club Preserves Natural Beauty
You might have noticed ladies in green aprons in front of the Harrison Memorial Library on Ocean Avenue in Carmel, carefully tending to the flower beds that brighten up the entrance. Or, you may have seen them working at the North Dunes above Carmel Beach, helping with habitat restoration underneath the supervision of a biologist. Or perhaps you’ve stopped to sip coffee on a bench at Piccadilly Park on Dolores Street while enjoying the serene landscaping in the middle of town. All these beautification and restorative projects are due in part to the work of the Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club.
Hallie Mitchell Dow recounts how her mother, Jean Booth Mitchell, along with Carol Stratton, cofounded the local club in 1980 while in the process of preserving the site of the former Piccadilly Nursery from commercial development. After much back and forth to gain the support of the City of Carmel, which owned the vacant plot of land on Dolores Street, the women spearheaded the project to create what is now Piccadilly Park.
“The issue was put up to an election and those very convincing little old ladies in tennis shoes prevailed,” Dow says. “With the help of a famous landscape architect, they did it right. It turned out to be a beautiful park with a spectacular oak tree in the center, many benches and places for weary shoppers to rest and relax by a gurgling fountain. It is a little oasis amongst the many shops and restaurants in town.”
Dow explains that the garden club is now part of the Garden Club of America and has been recognized for their “Partners for Plants” project on the Carmel Dunes at San Antonio and Ocean Avenues above beautiful Carmel Beach. Endangered species such as the legless lizard and the Acmon blue butterfly are being protected, and native plants like Tidestrom’s Lupine, Indian Paintbrush and Sand Verbena are cared for while weeds are removed.
“The Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club thrives due to its affiliation with the Garden Club of America,”
Dow says. “Founded in 1913, the Garden Club of America is a volunteer, nonprofit organization comprised of 200 member clubs throughout the country. GCA, as it is known, is world renowned for its contributions not only in scholarships and education, but in the fields of the environment, conservation and civic improvement.”
Garden tours at local properties, flower shows and generous donations help raise funds for projects. “You’ll find evidence of the Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club’s civic involvement all over the village and beyond,” Dow says. “Through a variety of fundraisers over the years, several major contributions and the creation of a sizable Founders Endowment Fund, the Club has created, and continues to maintain the Piccadilly Park Garden and the garden at Harrison Memorial Library. They re-landscaped the entire City Hall property, with a generous contribution from family and friends of member Connie Ridder, using appropriate natives and drought tolerant plants under the redwoods and pines.
Current Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club President, Cass Antle, is thrilled by the many scholarships that the group has given to horticulture education programs, including over $25,000 this year to Cal State University Monterey Bay, along with funding camp scholarships to the Hilton Bialek Habitat (MEarth) at Carmel Middle School. She says that education is key to conservation and sustainability.
“We want to stimulate the knowledge of love of gardening and continue to protect and educate
gardeners and nurseries with seminars on native species, invasive plants and responsible water use,” Antle says.
On these pages, three very different but very sustainably designed local gardens maintained by Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club members show the dramatic influence the club has had not just on our local town, but on residents’ personal gardens. Of course, club members have many other interests besides gardening.
Not only did Jean Booth Mitchell help form one of the country’s most ambitious garden clubs, acting as its first president, but she was also very active in real estate, and created The Mitchell Group real estate company with her husband Bill and children Bill and Hallie. This ensured a real estate legacy that passed down generation to generation, as evident in Bill and his wife Vicki, their daughter Shelly, and Shelly’s husband Dan’s ownership of Carmel Realty Company.
Known for her beautiful topiaries, Jean’s cottage garden in Carmel, “Cobweb,” was featured in a garden club exhibit in the Smithsonian and in a coffee table book. Today, a bench in her honor offers a place to rest near Carmel Beach.
“My mother’s bench is the middle one of the three on the corner of San Antonio and Ocean,” Dow shares. “When we roped off the area, as we started the North Carmel Dunes Restoration Project, we created and installed the informational sign on the beach which describes the project. We also installed a viewing patio area with three benches for people to sit and take in the view as they are walking up and down the hill there. It’s amazing how much use it gets.”
Dow is proud but not surprised of her mother’s dedication to the Monterey Peninsula.
“It’s not hard to acquire a commitment to community when you live in such a beautiful place,” Dow says.
Isabella de Sibert, owner of Stuck in the Mud garden management services and a Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club member, worked with the owner of this Santa Lucia Preserve property, who likes pinks, blues and purples, and different heights for the courtyard garden, with a focus on plants which attract insects, butterflies, bees and hummingbirds (photo above).
“This garden has to deal with some of the most extreme weather in the Monterey Bay area: cold winters and hot summers,” de Sibert says. “Wildlife is also a challenge because properties cannot be fenced (except for inner courtyards) so the abundant deer and wild boar can devastate a garden. Choosing the right plants to successfully cope with these challenges is essential."
According to the owner of this Pebble Beach property, the upper garden is made up of valerian, aquilegia, yellow California poppies, geranium Bill Wallis, yellow nasturtium, caryopteris, geranium maderense, ratibada, pelargonium sidoides, a tulip tree, tree ferns, cineraria, knautia and agapanthus blue and white. The lower garden, designed in honor of her husband, is made up of seeds of camomile, evening primrose, poppies, nasturtium, nigella, flax, monbrecia and shrubs of coffeeberry and ceanothus. The courtyard features lemon and lime trees, vines of passiflora membrancea and solandra, aka gold cup, hardy geraniums blue, Japanese anemones white, and oak leaf hydrangeas (photos above).
“Stepping out the front door of this Carmel home (photos above), one finds a marvelous stone pig which is nestled in some lomandra grass, some loropetalum, ferns and then balls of boxwood, pittosporum tenuifolium and
pittosporum crassifolium,” de Sibert says. “Camellias are from the Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club’s legendary Shirley Meneice, a renowned camellia expert, who recently passed away. There many oak leaf
hydrangeas and white abutilon are mixed in, creating a green garden.”
The Carmel-by-the-Sea Garden Club, a member of The Garden Club of America, maintains the garden at the Harrison Memorial Library (above). The club aims to stimulate the knowledge and love of gardening by protecting nature, beautification projects, and educating others. Other local civic improvements include working on the gardens at Piccadilly Park and the Constance Meach Ridder Memorial Garden at City Hall, along with protecting native species through the North Dunes Habitat Restoration Project above Carmel Beach.