Phyllis Ross looks more like the boss of a landscaping crew than she does a garden-club lady.
She wears work gloves instead of white gloves and a ball cap instead of a flowered hat.
And she isn't chatting amiably over tea with other ladies in voile dresses. She is telling them where to dig, what to pull out and what to plant.
"Nobody does anything without asking Phyllis first," says a fellow member of the Cliff Dwellers Garden Club. "Phyllis is the boss."
Ross is the creative force behind the restoration of the Friendship Garden on the grounds of the Evergreen house, and today is a work day.
Members of the Roland Park and Guilford garden club are out in force on this beautiful morning to spring-clean the intimate walled garden created by the late Alice Garrett during Evergreen's heyday.
The brown-bag lunches that the women bring to eat during the business meeting that follows the clean-up are a far cry from the fancy lunches original members served each other in the days when the club was rarified and exclusive. Today, everybody is a mess and sitting on the ground.
This tableau demonstrates more clearly than any garden-club archive the difference between then and now.
This isn't your grandma's garden club.
"We like to get our hands dirty," says Ross. Though a member of Cliff Dwellers for only 15 years, her horticultural skills have made her a leader among the members.
The first garden club in America was founded in 1891 in Athens, Ga., and the irony is that the original 12 members probably didn't garden. In that era, servants did the work.
At a time when a woman's social life centered on her church, garden clubs were a way for women segregated by denomination to socialize, and the clubs became a Southern tradition.
Though socializing and flower arranging were the twin pur- poses of garden clubs, they were also responsible for community beautification projects from their earliest days.
The Cliff Dwellers was begun in 1929 by Judge Morris A. Soper's wife for women who were excluded from other clubs because they lived in apartments. They focused on creating terrariums and on decorating windows and sun porches.
The Sopers occupied an entire floor of the Ambassador apartments, and Grace Parker Soper had 32 windows to beautify. The landless club focused its community service on buying gardening books for the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
