What’s this? Something new? An IDGC Newsletter? Well, yes and no. In this Age of Pandemic, I suspect we’re all beginning to see “new” as normal. So, the arrival of a newsletter at the time of our September Kickoff is both new and strangely normal. No kick-off; a newsletter in its place. Making the best of our situation, we bloom where we are planted.

It may interest you to know, and some of you may remember, this is not the first IDGC Newsletter. Inexplicably (actually if you knew my organizational style—not so much) I recently came across an IDGC Newsletter while clearing my garage workbench. In an envelope with a 15-cent stamp, addressed to my Mother-in-law Kathy, it was dated September 1980. In it, a poem by Esther Fry, a three-month calendar of events/refreshment committee assignments and two announcements: that we presented Mayor Bruce Dunbar and his wife with our Yard of the Month Award and that we ourselves had been awarded second place for our garden display at the Lake County Fair. Our theme: Plant A Garden in Your Heart.

We begin to plant that garden anew with this newsletter. We hope it will nurture the ties of friendship and love of gardens that bind us together till we meet again.