Suji - You are welcome to stop by my open garden near Brookeville on May 29 -30. A few folks come from near and far to see the garden and how it is changing year to year. This year with the devistation of 3 Blizzards and crushed roses, I'm guessing that we will have much of the wild look of years some time ago which some visitors may welcome again. With warm weather after the snow, my rose classes appear to be a few days ahead of schedule. However, there should not be a significan shortage of bloom. We always welcome rose enthusiasts of all sorts. I am even cultivating more visits by teasing a couple of local garden clubs with OGR talks this spring to come and smell the roses - even the HT folks sneak a peak sometimes (I may have a few of them as well). Please stop by and enjoy whatever we have and share some of your OGR stories and ideas as well. We'd love to share the garden such as it may be this spring. PS - The roses have already begun to bloom. Father Hugo's rose, Old Blush and Sophie's Perpetual have already begun to bloom and some HP's buds are showing color. What's not to love about zone 6b? Best, Nick

Hi Lily, I hope your really enjoy your local rose society. I belong to the Cherry Capital Rose Society here in Northern Michigan and I really enjoy the fine people and great events. Our dues are only $15 a year, which includes twelve monthly newsletters. We don't have to charge much because we don't exhibit or have rose shows. Check out our website - it's a great group. Look at the event page to see the different things we do each month. Here is a link that might be useful: Cherry Capital Rose Society

I think it is a great idea, Don. You might also observe on your driving around the residential areas some hosta in a few gardens. If so, are you up to stopping and chatting with the owner on a weekend or a time when the gardener might be home? In such a case, I'd have some cards printed up to leave on the door, pointing them to your Flickr or Photobucket site where they may view your garden. Include in your credentials that you are a member of the American Hosta Society too. It might be nice to include a link to the GardenWeb Hosta Forum also. Most folks are Internet savvy unless they are a lot older than MOI! Try for some instant trust and confidence, because a "cold call" is the hardest there is to make. Oops, we are having another downpour, looks like fog it is so heavy. It gave me just enough time to pot up the six new hosta from Van Wade, but not take their pictures. What a great day to read and listen to the thunder. Another day off. :) Hosta going wild I am sure.

We were active members of the local society when we had a local society. Some of the above post have started to nibble at the edges of the real issues. 1. Distance. There are limits to how far people will go to attend a meeting. Most of our regular attendees traveled less than half an hour to the meetings. The farthest among them traveled about 45 minutes. While some people may happily travel longer, it is a very real constraint. 2. Time of meetings. Every group I've been involved in has been torn in half between two very basic points of view. Older, retired people often dislike driving at night, and prefer holding meetings weekend afternoons. Younger, working people dislike having meetings during their prime gardening hours and prefer holding meetings weekday evenings. 3. Programming. This was our biggest issue. There really aren't that many speakers/programs with the breadth of experience to give a totally new program every year. It isn't easy to come up with interesting enough programs once a month, almost every month, year after year. This is the one area the ARS really let us down. Because of our size, we were very dependent on outside material. At that point, they had about 3 canned programs on hardy roses, and that was it. It was equally hard to get appropriate newsletter material from outside. If you are far enough north that you can pretty much cut and paste standard HT culture articles, this isn't going to be an issue. If you feel the standard articles need a lot of editing to be accurate, then you are going to be in our position where everything has to be created by your society, and that is a lot of work. 4. Participation. 'Many hands make light work' is true. None of this is a problem if you have enough people willing to help. If you can get 12 people to each contribute a newsletter article once a year, that's an original article every month, with nobody doing a lot of work. However, you have to ask a lot of people to get those 12. The same is true for every other society job. Someone may be willing to be President for a year or two, but quits in a huff after ten years because they have been pushed too far. Notice I haven't said anything about shows. Within fairly reasonable guidelines, shows can be what the local society wants them to be. We had shows where the Dowager and Modern Shrub classes had more entries and more exhibitors than Exhibition HT. If we had continued on, we were seriously considering creating our own Shrub certificates because we needed a Shrub court.