Orchid Expert Will Be

Guest Speaker For

Garden Club’s Next Program

Orchids will be the theme at the February meeting of The Garden Club of Newtown. The speaker will be Cheri Kendall, who lives in Newtown and is the owner of Out of the Ordinary, a nursery business which presently grows mostly orchids. She has been growing a large variety of orchids suited to all temperature ranges for 11 years on windowsills, under artificial lights and in a greenhouse.

The members of the garden club will meet at noon on Tuesday, February 27, for lunch and a business meeting. The public is invited to Cheri Kendall’s lecture, which will begin at 1 pm, in the first floor meeting room of Cyrenius H. Booth Library.

Ms Kendall has won many awards for her orchids and exhibits in orchid shows. She helped to found Westchester Orchid Society and has served on the orchid societies as newsletter editor. She has traveled the country serving on various committees for the American Orchid Society.

In 1997 after suffering a heart attack, Mrs Kendall and her husband moved to Newtown with the idea of “slowing down.” That move, however, turned into the opportunity to relieve stresses by going out an digging another garden.

“There is nothing like the sweet smell of the earth or the musty smell of a healthy greenhouse to make you feel good again,” says Mrs Kendall, who spends most of her time developing her 21/2 -acre property in Newtown with organic perennial gardens and a wildlife habitat to protect against the encroachment of developers alongside Paugusset State Forest.

This spring a 20 by 40-foot greenhouse is being constructed on her property which will be used to raise orchids, rare plants and other plants that are new in the trade. She continues to raise orchids, conducts workshops and presents lectures to a variety of garden groups. She is the curator of several private orchid collections and consults with those interested in equipping their greenhouse specifically for orchid culture.

For her garden club lecture, Mrs Kendall will cover the basics of orchid culture, what to look for when buying a plant and suggest some tried and true easy to grow orchids. She will discuss problems incurred when purchasing or receiving orchids as gifts that come from florists, garden centers and supermarkets, as well as how to keep the plant alive and re-bloom it.

Non-members are welcome to attend the program free of charge. For additional information contact garden club publicity chairman Ginnie Carey at 270-1108.