On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 17:06:11 +0000, Jane Ransom wrote:

We are in the process of bringing our local 'Horticultural Society' into
the twenty first century and are looking for ideas for activities that
might attract the younger inhabitants of our village.

Without being rude, please, does anyone have any brilliant brain waves
that might help us out?

We have much the same problem here with our local rock gardening
club. Our membership is graying and slowly dwindling in number --
and it's hard to think what might reverse this trend. Certainly
there's no quick fix.

It might help to understand the social forces that lead to this
kind of thing. I can think of a few:

1. There are many more leisure time activities these days than
there used to be, and they compete with gardening for leisure
hours.

2. People have ~fewer~ leisure hours than they used to, and work
is much more stressful. Modern life is far more complex and
demanding than life fifty years ago (say). By the time a working
stiff gets home, he (or she) is so exhausted that the last thing
he wants to do is go outside and dig around in the soil. (Even
though it might relieve the stress and exhaustion.)

3. A well-established group can become too satisfied with itself
or too tightly knit a social group and thus not very welcoming to
new members.

4. Gardens are smaller these days so the tried-and-true ways of
gardening don't work as well as they used to.


I've thought that staging small one-day displays at local
shopping malls *might* attract potential new members, but with
something as specialized as rock gardening, perhaps one person in
a thousand would turn out to be a keener.

It's a nasty problem and I look forward with interest to other
replies.


(Incidentally, the Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden
Society is the oldest rock garden club in the world, predating
the AGS by almost ten years! There's an older Swiss group that
maintains a true alpine garden up on an alp somewhere, but they
aren't the same kind of outfit and Don't Count.)


--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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