Reflections By Louise Mounsey
Member and Board Member Emeritus

For forty years the Evergreen Garden Club has been a vibrant, active and imaginative group. So many times someone has said to me, “Remember when we did that? Wasn’t that fun?” For many years we met in the hospitality room of the Public Service Company – now the Xcel building, and for many more years we have enjoyed the hospitality of the Church of the Hills.

Along with the entertaining projects and informative programs we have had, we have continued to beautify our community with planting and maintaining many flower beds. The first project that we took on was a flower garden in a square of railroad ties in the middle of the downtown Evergreen Highway 73 & 74 intersection. What was then the site of Evergreen’s only traffic light is now a vortex of thousands of vehicles a day spinning off to places that didn’t even have a name forty years ago.

Another early project was the American Legion Barney Lamer Memorial at Bear Creek Cemetery, north of Christ the King Church. For the memorial we went to one of the member’s homes in Conifer and dug up trees, shrubs and wildflowers to transplant. One flowerbed we planted in red, white and blue for our Memorial Day remembrance. The memorial project continued for many years but became impossible because of the proliferation of wildlife. Pocket gophers and voles raised havoc with our plants; and when the elk became omnipresent, we had to throw in the trowel.

One early project that is still in full bloom today is the Hiwan Homestead Museum Garden. We continue to maintain it primarily as an old fashioned flower bed with plants that may have been grown a hundred years ago. In those earlier days cattle roamed most of this area, but were fenced away from home sites. Today, the elk roam free and we have had to include in the garden, plants that area distasteful to the elk.

With loving care, many of our projects have been carried on though the years, May the Evergreen Garden Club enjoy another forty years of great mountain gardening