Love water gardens? Joining a gardening club can connect you to all sorts of people in your community who also adore water gardens, ponds, koi, and wetland gardening.
Benefits of a Water Gardening or Pond Club
Joining a pond club has many benefits. If you can make it to meetings, you can benefit from opportunities for further education, both by learning from other gardeners and from formal education sessions. Members may share plants and plant cuttings. Pond club membership can also include discounts or special arrangements with local gardening stores and gardening conferences. You can also read about research and practical applications of water, pond, and wetland gardening through online and paper journals.
Finding a Water Gardening Club
There are water gardening clubs in every corner of the world, although areas with a moderate year-round climate or a cultural tradition of water gardening have more clubs than other areas. For a list of clubs in the United States, visit the Water Gardeners International web site.
Ask at your local garden store or gardening club. Although there may not be water gardening associations in every community, there are often regional associations if there are none in individual cities. In addition to asking about water gardening associations, ask about pond clubs: the two are often one and the same, although water gardening associations tend to be more broad-based.
You can also start a pond gardening club by attending gardening workshops put on by extension services, horticultural and gardening associations, and botanical gardens. If there enough interested workshop participants, they may be interested in forming an informal gardening club.
International Water Gardening Clubs
Internationally, the Aquatic Gardeners Association publishes a journal called The Aquatic Gardener. There are aquatic gardening contests, and most importantly, there are DVDs and t-shirts for club members. There is also an aquatic gardeners forum.
Online Water Gardening Communities and Clubs
If you live in a rural area, you can still belong to a water gardening club. There are online forums with spaces for water gardeners. Water Gardeners International also offers an online journal with its free membership. It also has an email discussion list about water gardening. American Ponders is for Americans, but everyone is welcome on the forums.
As with any niche hobby, it can be difficult to find a group of pond and water gardeners within your own community. Search for like-minded gardeners at local gardening clubs, garden store and botanical garden education seminars, and online through forums and email lists. Joining a gardening club will enrich your experience as a pond gardener.
Tricia Edgar - Tricia Edgar is a gardener, environmental educator, and science writer from the Pacific Northwest.
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