43
Sweetbriar Garden Club keeps Austintown blooming
Photo
Senior member Dorothy Fizet, who has been a member of Sweetbriar since 1968, gives an informal tour of the Austintown library garden that includes perennial flowers and mums.
Photo
Marge Bielawski (kneeling) just couldn’t leave until she did a little cleaning of the garden before the Sweetbriar ladies went home.
Photo
Neighbors | Sarah Foor.The ladies of the Sweetbriar Garden Club gathered in front of their garden at Austintown library.
By SARAH FOOR
The Sweetbriar Garden Club is less like an organization and more like a family.
The women, whose current causes include the upkeep of a garden at the Austintown library and decorating the library for Christmas, have kept the club alive for 50 years. They have made it a warm gathering place for gardeners and conservationists.
Sweetbriar’s most senior member and program chair is Dorothy Fizet, who took a moment to reflect on how the club has changed since her joining in 1968.
“Not much has changed. We’ve stopped gardening in dresses and bouffants, of course, but our focus has always been on providing gardening and learning programs and finding opportunities for altruism,” she said. “But mostly, we’re just friends. We meet, we gab, we cook, we garden.”
Indeed, the causes of Sweetbriar haven’t changed much since 11 women created the Four Season Garden Club in 1960, which would change into the Sweetbriar Garden Club in the years that followed.
The club included professional horticulturists as well as novice gardeners and over its 50 years has volunteered for the Canfield Fair and Mill Creek Garden Center, judged in local flower shows, and continued their summer flower bed and Christmas decorating at the Austintown library for 35 years.
“For membership,” Sweetbriar member Irene Smart explained, “our only requirement is that you live in Austintown. But once you’re in, you’re in for life,” she said with a smile.