Garden Club Scholarships Help Hort Majors Achieve Their Dreams

By: Jamie Creamer

The year was 1954. Claud Brown was only a high school senior, but already the enterprising young flower enthusiast had managed to open his own fledgling florist in his hometown of Opelika.

His one true dream, though, was to go to Alabama Polytechnic Institute in nearby Auburn, to study ornamental horticulture. There was but a single barrier to that dream: money.

Fortunately, a secretary at his high school was a local garden club member who knew that the state federation of garden clubs intended that very year to initiate a horticulture scholarship to API. She passed that information along to Brown.

An excited Brown submitted his application and was elated when he was selected to receive the Garden Club of Alabama's first scholarship, in the amount of $250.

"It was wonderful, because it was the deciding factor in me being able to begin my college education," Brown, a 1958 API grad, recalls today. "Tuition was $45 a quarter, so the scholarship covered all my tuition and most of my textbooks for a full year."

For Brown, that scholarship laid the foundation for what would become a horticultural career that flourished for more than five decades.

For the Garden Club of Alabama, it was the start of something really big. Since that initial $250 award, the Garden Club of Alabama Inc. has gone on to establish six scholarship endowments and has handed out 150-plus scholarships totaling more than $218,000 to students majoring in horticulture, landscape design and forestry conservation at Auburn University.

Mallory Jones of Selma, a senior in landscape design at Auburn, is one of this year's six GCA scholarship recipients, and just as it was for Brown and has been for dozens of other AU horticulture majors, the award has been a financial boon.

"I've got an older sister in graduate school here at Auburn and a younger sister who's a freshman, so this scholarship is a huge blessing," Jones says. "Just ask my parents."

The GCA's relationship with Auburn began decades ago, when for years the organization held its annual convention in the university town.

"Through the years, we got very involved with the (AU) horticulture department and developed a general interest in the campus and the students," GCA scholarship chairwoman Barbara Bohmann of Auburn says. "The scholarship program was brought on as a project because it was seen as a way to encourage the study of horticulture and to help top-notch students in the state reach their educational goals. These students are our future."

In the early years of the GCA's scholarship program, the organization awarded the annual scholarship while at the same time contributing to a fund to establish an endowment that would permanently fund it. In 1959, the GCA reached its goal, completing the endowment that officially established the Garden Club of Alabama Horticulture Award.

That same year, a second scholarship, jointly funded by then-horticulture department head L.M. Ware and the GCA, was established. It was known as the Mary Hall Ware Scholarship in Horticulture, in memory of Ware's wife.

But the GCA wasn't content with just two scholarship endowments. In 1977, the statewide organization endowed a scholarship to be awarded to a student studying landscape design. That was followed two years later by an endowment establishing a lasting tribute to Ware, the L.M. Ware Memorial Scholarship in Horticulture.

A forestry conservation scholarship the GCA set up in 1985 brought the number of endowments to five. The sixth was established in 1988 to honor the memory of Verna Ruffin Welchel, a member of Auburn's Perry Garden Club who, in 1933, served as the second president of the GCA.

For the current school year, the GCA scholarships are paying out a total of $12,681 to the six recipients.

The GCA, which adds to all six endowments every year, gets the funds for its scholarship program from a number of sources, including gifts, memorials and honorariums; proceeds from special projects sponsored by member clubs; rebate dollars from a printer cartridge/cell phone recycling project; rental income from the leasing of the organization's former headquarters building on the AU campus to the Alabama Nursery and Landscape Association; and, the traditional major source, lifetime memberships. One hundred percent of each $50 lifetime membership goes toward scholarships.

In recent years, that latter category has become a concern for Bohmann and other GCA leaders. Membership in local garden clubs around the state is dwindling, as aging members leave the clubs in greater numbers than new members join.

The Garden Club of Alabama was established in 1932 with 17 clubs and grew to 51 clubs and 1,161 members by 1935. Membership peaked in 1963 with 745 clubs and 14,700 members. Today, there are 180 federated clubs statewide, with membership totaling 3,482.

"We've seen membership decline as the number of women working outside the home has increased," Bohmann says.

Bohmann first joined a garden club in 1962, when she lived in Montgomery. When she and husband Charles moved to Auburn the following year, she had to get on a waiting list for a slot in the Perry Garden Club.

She's been extremely active at the local and state level ever since, even through the 31 years when she worked full time at the Auburn University Federal Credit Union. But it was in 1997, when she retired as credit union president and CEO, that Bohmann assumed duties as GCA's scholarship chief.

Last year, she received special recognition from the GCA for her role in spearheading the scholarship program, the GCA Web site calling the scholarship chairmanship "her greatest love, outside of husband Charles."

"My role is as liaison between the Garden Club of Alabama, Auburn University and the scholarship recipients," she says. "To me, it's just a joy working with these students year after year and watching them achieve their dreams."

The GCA tries to keep up with past scholarship recipients, and so it was at the organization's 2006 convention in Auburn this past spring that state president Jackie Quisenberry of Enterprise welcomed special guest Claud Brown, the Garden Club of Alabama's first scholarship recipient some 52 years ago.

Brown, who retired from his Opelika floral, landscaping and greenhouse business in late 2004, had a presentation of his own for the GCA. It was a check, for $250.

"I thought it would be a nice thing to do, because that scholarship those many years back meant so much to me," Brown says.

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