After more than 80 years as owners of the Old Mill in West Tisbury, the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club is considering passing stewardship of the 175-year-old industrial building to an organization better suited to its care.
A talk on the preservation of wild flowers, with fascinating illustrations in water color, painted by the lecturer, was presented before the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club Tuesday afternoon by Miss Eloise L. Luquer. Miss Luquer charmed her audience by her personality and her interesting and constructive lecture, given with just the correct light and amusing touch which makes the acquirement of knowledge a pleasant and easy task. The water colors, about thirty in number, were hung on the walls of the garden club center.
A Vineyard wild flower sanctuary, where native plants, flowers and shrubs will be planted and protected, under conditions which will allow the general public to see and enjoy them, is in the process of becoming a reality at Christiantown. Mrs. Wilfrid O. White of Vineyard Haven, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, has been given permission, and some financial aid, by the county board, with which to pit her plan into operation on the county-owned land adjacent to the Indian burying ground on this historic spot, and the initial survey has been made by Will C.
Just two days after Arbor Day, which comes April 26, is Spring Planting Day at the Christiantown Burial Ground in North Tisbury. The Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club has planned the event at Christiantown, home of the now vanished Praying Indians, and will plant both seeds and actual plants of any wild flowers which members can procure and contribute. Gardeners are urged to take their lunch and be at the historic rendezvous at 12 noon on Monday, April 28, or if that day should prove rainy, the next pleasant day.
The structure on the Old Mill River, West Tisbury, had its second birthday on Tuesday. And this seems strange, for the building, staunch as the day it was built, and preceded on the site by other buildings devoted to the same purpose it fulfilled so long, has a long and honorable history.
The sides of the weatherbeaten old mill at West Tisbury fairly bulged with the throng who gathered there to participate in the silver jubilee celebration of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club on Tuesday afternoon. Including those who stood outside and listened through the windows, attendance at the meeting was close to the three hundred mark with others dropping in later at the Open House.
