Scroll through our slide show about GCEH’s community outreach programs in East Hampton. These include our 11 community gardens, all open and free to residents and visitors, and our scholarship program, now funding seven high school.
The Garden Club of East Hampton is working with a host of partners (New York Natural Heritage, the Long Island Flora Association, The Nature Conservancy, New York Botanical Garden) and local volunteers to help revive New York State’s last known population of this beautiful native orchid, Platanthera ciliaris. We cage the plants to protect them from deer browse, clear shrubs to provide more sunlight to the forest floor, and monitor progress.
Designed and planted by Garden Club of East Hampton members in the 1930s as a resource to teach local children about native plants, the Nature Trail today is a novel ecosystem, of a mix of native plants (like the early spring skunk cabbage above) and invasive species competing for space.
The Garden Club of East Hampton, through the Kazickas Internship Program, is funding East Hampton High School students to work with botanist Victoria Bustamante to study the composition of plants at the Village’s Nature Trail. Based on turn of the century documents, we know that invasive species have made major incursions, such that the Nature Trail is now a novel ecosystem. These mixes of native and invasive species cover three quarters of wild lands on the planet. Developing the information about what grows on the Nature Trail now is the first step in understanding what these changes mean for East Hampton. To date, the students have submitted 60 herbarium specimens to the New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lina Steere Herbarium. Shown on the left is a specimen of Amelanchier intermedia Spach from NYBG’s Virtual Herbarium, collected in Montauk by Ms. Bustamante.
The past year, GCEH expanded its scholarship program for East Hampton High School seniors. Now, seven students, pictured above, spend time each Sunday during the school year at Montauk County State Park with the staff of Third House Nature Center. The students are creating a tree trail to highlight native trees, monitoring salamanders, and using exclosures to study browse impacts in this 1,157-acre state park.
The Garden Club of East Hampton designed and cares for most of the plantings at the East Hampton Train Station, from the lovely Dortmund roses along the split rail fence to the Natchez crape myrtles that shade the garden.
The Pollinator Garden at Town Hall, in front of the historica DeMenil buildings, is a great place to look for ideas for how you can support the environment by planting for pollinators.
Be sure to stop and examine the early spring hellebore collection the Garden Club of East Hampton is building on the Gay Road side of the Post Office, on the edge of the planting beds.
The Garden Club of East Hampton designed, installed, and helps maintain the plantings around the East Hampton Post Office on Gay Road. Blue Nikko hydrangeas in summer add color and the plantings soften the brick building.
The Brick Courtyard Garden, in an interior courtyard at the East Hampton Library, is a quiet place to work or read outside. A table and chairs are now shaded by a large sailcloth, providing a welcome relief from the hot summer sun.
The Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden, 101 Main Street, between Clinton Academy and the East Hampton STar, and designed by member Abby Jane Brody, is a great place to search for ideas for native plants and their cultivars for your own garden.
While visiting Rachel’s, walk around Mulford Farm to enjoy the lovely heritage apple trees in the Janice S. Brightwell Heritage Apple Tree Collection. Growing heritage apples helps to preserve the genetic diversity of this important agricultural crop, which arrived in America with the first colonists.
Rachel’s Historic Dooryard Garden at Mulford Farm, 10 James Lane, is filled with meticulously researched plants grown by women in their dooryard gardens in Colonial times, from culinary to medicinal to household uses.
The Mary Nimmo Moran Garden at The Studio, 220 Main Street, evokes the grandmother’s gardens planted across America at the end of the 19th century. Gardeners of the time had access to a wide range of plants offered in seed catalogs, and often chose plants used by their grandmothers. Photo by Anita Holmes.
