JoEllen Beard sits on her couch and flips through a three-ring binder several inches thick, looking for the title of a keynote speech. The binder, one of two, is filled with information she has collected over the past two years as chairman of a committee that organizes the state Master Gardener Conference. This year's gathering is May 21-23 at the DoubleTree Hotel.
The address by Erica Glasener Goldstein is titled "A Passion for the Gardening Life." The speech will highlight a conference as jam-packed as that three-ring binder with seminars, tours and activities for Arkansans who have completed the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service's Master Gardener program.
There are some 3,200 Master Gardeners across the state, and Beard says she expects more than 600 of them to attend the conference. "We've got all kinds of speakers and tours of gardens," she says.
Speakers include Eric Sundell, who will talk about the unique pollination of milkweed, and Tom Dillard, whose garden planning seminar is titled "Chartreuse Does Not Go With Pink." Other subjects include native plants, hydroponics, English gardens and one on container gardening called "Spillers, Fillers and Thrillers."
Attendees will have a chance to tour the Vogel Shwartz Sculpture Garden, view the landscaping in the Creative Corridor and, during a preconference tour called "Manicured to Mother Nature," guests will visit P. Allen Smith's Moss Mountain Farm "where everything is immaculate," Beard says. Also on the agenda is a trip to Pinnacle Mountain State Park to see "a riot of wildflowers."
Master Gardeners aren't just gardening enthusiasts; they're volunteers. The Master Gardeners in Pulaski County alone donated 20,882 hours toward public projects in 2016, Beard says.
"The IRS says that every hour that you work as a volunteer is worth $23.56. For 2016 that's $491,979.92, almost half a million dollars -- only in Pulaski County," Beard says. The county has about 500 members, who also logged 13,277 education hours, which include attending seminars and visiting gardens.
Among the county's 32 Master Gardener projects are a rose garden at the Pulaski County Courthouse, a demonstration vegetable garden at Heifer International, gardens at The Old Mill, a butterfly garden at the Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, a Horticulture Hotline and The Historic Arkansas Museum.
Beard's Master Gardener project is taking care of the plants and gardens at the Historic Arkansas Museum along with other Master Gardeners. The gardens, including a vegetable garden and a kitchen garden, mirror what Arkansans were planting in the mid-1800s.
"It is a demonstration-type garden, so we grow a little bit of a lot of different things. So we have small patches. We have a pretty good patch of potatoes. The museum staff use a lot of the vegetables in their demonstrations with schoolchildren."
A major benefit of being a Master Gardener, Beard says, is being able to pass along what one learns. "That's the wonderful thing, being able to educate others. I taught elementary school for 32 years so you know that's pretty important to me. We have a lot of children that come through that have never seen potatoes dug up out of the ground. You should see them when you dig up a potato, hand it to them and say 'here, take this home.'"
The group works at the museum every Monday. "We worked this morning on putting in spring things. We got our peas in. We've got cotton coming up. I was working out on the street this morning, putting in things for the butterfly garden. We have a lot of native plants along the split rail fence. A lot of those came from my yard. I'm real proud of that."
It's just a great group of people, she says of the volunteers. "One of the joys [of being a Master Gardener] is digging in the dirt with people you never knew. It's just a joy to make friends that way."
Anyone interested in becoming a Master Gardener may apply at his County Extension Service office, says Extension Service horticulture specialist Janet B. Carson. "Counties do training at various times throughout the year. The training is fairly standardized with core curriculum and some electives totaling 40 hours of horticulture education.''
''Once they are trained, they commit to giving back 40 hours of volunteer work to their county and getting 20 hours of new education. After year one, they are required to volunteer 20 hours and get 20 hours of education.''
The Master Gardener Conference will include an Art and Garden Fair that is open to the public. The fair will be from 1-5 p.m. on May 21 and 8 a.m.-3 p.m. on May 22. More information on the Master Gardener program is available here: uaex.edu/yard-garden/master-gardeners.
High Profile on 05/14/2017