Members of the Scarborough Garden Club enjoyed their annual meeting in June with a luncheon at the Purpoodock Country Club, celebrating a banner year that saw participation in many successful projects:

• Maintaining the herb garden and the flag-circle garden at the Hunnewell House;

• Overseeing the white flower/shrub Garden of Hope at the Maine Medical Center Scarborough campus;

• Donating mums to the library in the fall and decorating Christmas wreaths for the library, the Historical Society, the Hunnewell House and for St. Nicholas Church, the club meeting place.

In addition, contributions were made to the Scarborough River Wildlife Sanctuary, the Friends of the Marsh and the Land Trust, and a scholarship was awarded to a Scarborough resident entering college and majoring in some field of horticulture.

The club’s plant sale was a rousing success. Held at the Hunnewell House every year on the first Saturday of June, it has become a most satisfactory fundraiser thanks to the many plants donated by all the members. It is also known as an excellent way for local gardeners to replenish their gardens with all types of hardy, homegrown perennials and annuals.

Another great contribution to the beauty of Scarborough neighborhoods is the coveted Green Thumb Award: Every summer a committee of garden clubbers tours the town and recognizes several gardens for their splendor.

The club’s June picnic took place in the gardens of member Barbara Zaharis on a beautiful day sandwiched between many rainy ones. Barbara has labeled her gorgeous gardens – butterfly, rose, black, blue, water; she even has a monster garden, dominated by a mullein candle plant and a Scotch thistle, each of which is easily 4 feet tall.

If you would like to walk around Barbara’s garden, join the Garden Tour sponsored by the club on Saturday, July 18. Nine Scarborough gardens are featured on the tour. Tickets may be purchased at many local stores, and at the Hunnewell House on the morning of the tour.

Lighthouses spotlighted

The Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse Trust held its annual meeting in the Portland Marine Society Room on the SMCC campus at Spring Point. Earle Shettleworth, state historian and director of the Maine Historic Preservation Committee, presented a slide lecture covering many of the lighthouses dotting the Maine coast. Using outstanding images provided by architectural photographer Richard Cheek, Mr. Shettleworth entertained the trust’s members and many volunteers with enthralling stories about the lighthouse keepers and their families, and about the architects, particularly Alexander Parris. He also congratulated the members of the trust for assuming responsibility for the lighthouse under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000. Great news: The lighthouse will be open to the public for tours every Saturday through the summer months, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets are available at the end of the breakwater. If you haven’t been inside a lighthouse, furnished as if the keeper were still in residence, now is your chance!

Grave subject

More than 175 years ago, the citizens of Boston realized that their city cemeteries were no longer adequate, and, exhibiting remarkable foresight, set aside 175 acres in the nearby countryside to serve as a nonsectarian, nonprofit garden cemetery, to be known as Mt. Auburn. Thanks to the Cumberland County Extension Service, we enjoyed a wonderful tour of the cemetery, led by a Mt. Auburn horticulturist, a gentleman who seemed to know every tree in that spectacular landscape. We saw weeping European beeches, dawn redwoods, Japanese maples, native oaks, sugar maples, gingkos, western red cedars, Japanese stewartia and sassafrass.

I loved seeing the graves of Henry Cabot Lodge, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but I especially liked the monument to Nathaniel Bowditch, a big-as-life sculpture of that Salem navigator seated with a globe under his left hand and a book in his right hand – undoubtedly “The American Practical Navigator,” beloved by every seaman. We also had time to climb the Tower on the Hill, in the center of the cemetery, built in 1852 of Quincy granite. Ninety-five steps led to the top, where we were rewarded by an incredible view of the Boston skyline.

Banke account

Strawbery Banke (yes, that’s how it is spelled) was the destination of a group of OLLI seniors, under the guidance of Sherry Chapman, a teacher at OLLI who started her career as an intern at that museum in Portsmouth, N.H., many years ago. She explained that when settlers arrived in 1630, they found the banks of the Piscataqua covered with wild strawberries, the first fresh food they had tasted in many weeks – hence the name Strawbery Banke. It was not until 1653 that the area became known as Portsmouth.

The museum, on 10 acres and comprising more than 40 buildings, attempts to show the history of this neighborhood from those early days when it was a bustling seaport and the home of artisans, merchants and mariners, right through to the 1950s, when it was scheduled for demolition. Rescued by concerned citizens who saw an opportunity to interpret for the public 350 years of urban history, Strawbery Banke is now a museum that “preserves history across time” rather than a re-creation of one time period, as in Mystic Seaport or Sturbridge.

We visited the Sherburne House (1695), admiring the two prominent front gables, the steeply pitched roof and the small, diamond-paned windows. Inside was a fascinating exhibit showing various aspects of house building. The display in the Joshua Jackson House (1750) described the people who had lived in the house between 1750 and 1950. In the Lowd House (1810), we talked with a chair maker, in costume, who was making, all by hand, a chair common in the 1760s – the seat from white pine, the spindles from red oak and the legs from rock maple. The most elegant house was that of Ichabod Goodwin, sea captain, merchant, early industrialist and twice governor of New Hampshire. A stately Federal-style mansion built in 1812, it is furnished as it would have been when the Goodwins lived there from 1832 to 1882 and boasts many pieces original to the family. It is surrounded by a glorious formal Victorian garden highlighted by a stately, three-tiered fountain.