Twenty-five years of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club leave us wondering a little what the Island would have been without this active force. It is easy to recall dozens of times when the traditional understanding as to billboards would have been broken, when trees would needlessly have been cut down, when road work would have ravaged the countryside without need, when many unforeseen contingencies of the kind have arisen, and the good sense and courteous firmness of the Garden Club have prevailed.
On the constructive side, the club has proceeded, year in and year out, to help projects which would conserve and increase the Island’s attractiveness, and to invite speakers who have discussed a wide range of matters all interwoven with conservation, with technics and objectives of gardening in the broadest sense, and with the greater concept of the Island as a garden of everyone who comes here. Although the speakers have addressed club meetings, the talks have been extensively reported and assimilated, so that one might say the club has held an institute of twenty-five years duration.
It would be easy to overemphasize the club’s crusading phase. True, this has been an alert, a vigilant group, thoroughly representative, ready to take a stand for common sense and conservation whenever an issue arose. But the stand has always been courteous, carefully impersonal, and firmness has been within the larger framework of cooperation, never dictatorial.
Wherever one drives on the Island, the influence of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, in some degree or variation, shines out at him from the unspoiled countryside. It is not often that a club has worked with such harmony and consistency over so long a period, with so satisfactory a result.
We believe that all Islanders and visitors join in a twenty-fifth anniversary greeting and congratulation to the club and its leaders through a productive quarter of a century.
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