Caitlen Cameron [00:09:56] Did you garden as a kid?

Barbara Shockey [00:09:59] Actually, no. My memories of anything garden-related as a child involved probably when we were four years old, a bunch of us went into a neighbor's yard and there was a couple, several beautiful red tomatoes, and we each picked one. It was a hot summer day and we probably hid behind the, I don't know, behind the garage somewhere and started eating these tomatoes and sucking the juice out of every section and thinking it was the most glorious thing we ever tasted. And then I'm realizing somebody grew this from nothing. I mean, it was like a miracle. You know, it just did not come from the store! I was like, shocked. And of course, then guilt set in after that. And I thought, oh, this was not a good thing. And so we didn't, didn't pull that stunt again.

Then there was another moment in my memory of another neighbor. Now, my mother was not a gardener, but some of the neighbors were, and this woman had dug this hole and I watched her. And again, I was maybe four or five years old at the most, and she filled it with water, just turned on the hose and filled the hole with water. And then she put what I what I think was a rose bush in this hole and then filled it in with dirt. And I thought that was amazing. All that water where did it go? And she, that was how it is really pretty much how you are supposed to plant some of these things is fill the hole with water.

[00:11:46] Some of my garden club members are probably saying, oh, what does she know? So...and I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you fill that hole with water. Also, you can time how long it takes the hole to absorb the water and that'll tell you a lot about your soil. So that's a whole other chapter, which I don't know enough about to teach.

So anyway, that and then I guess my third and last memory was being back at my grandmother's house in Springfield during the summer and playing hide and seek and hiding what I think must have been a garden filled with some roses. And I remember smelling the most glorious smell and I don't know what kind. I think it's roses. But to this day, if I'm in a room with that smell, I'm back at my grandmother's.

Barbara Shockey [00:12:50] I ended up joining the Garden Club, the Village Garden Club, because it really came through my involvement with the Cleveland Yale Ball. My husband was a Yalie or is a Yalie and we were involved in the Yale Ball and there were several other men that were Yalies and their wives were Garden Club members. And it was Anne Gardiner and Anne Stevens. And they cornered me and said, we want to propose you for this garden club. Well, I knew nothing. You know, I thought well, I thought, you know, it would be kind of fun because my whole career has been male dominated. I was the first female appraiser, the first non-clerical in wherever I was working. And so it was kind of lonely. I didn't really have a chance to get to be around women. And I thought probably time I did that. So I joined the Garden Club and at that time I did not have a clue that we had a Cherry Tree Grove.

[00:14:33] I had no ambition to get deeply involved in the club until one day I was at a meeting and it, it just didn't seem to go too well. It wasn't a whole lot of organization and I finally just kind of shook my head and said I think it's time to get involved. So I volunteered to do some leadership if they needed me. As it turns out, they put me as Vice President.

Caitlen Cameron [00:16:18] So as vice president, what were your duties?

Barbara Shockey [00:16:23] Well, it wasn't terribly defined at the time. I think it's better defined now. We've sort of tightened up some bylaws, but it was basically to do anything the President needed. I was sort of the right-hand gal on that. But as it turns out, I thought we were about to have our 85th anniversary and at that time we didn't have a lot of extra money in the bank for a party or some big event. And we were trying to scratch our heads. What, what can we do special? And I came up with this marvelous idea that I would research the history of the club and at every meeting I would spend about five minutes giving a little snippet of our history.

And I thought this would be easy. It was anything but easy. I then got all the archives from Mickey Horner, who was moving from her house in Shaker out to a retirement facility, and she was delighted to get rid of them because they were filling a whole closet. We were fortunate. Village had a lot of archives. I just couldn't believe how many boxes and scrapbooks and minutes, boxes of minutes from years and years and years. So I brought them all home and I proceeded to start to read them and I started to say, Okay, I'm going to take the decade of the '30s, so I would concentrate on that. And then each decade. And really didn't do much past the '60s where we had the freeway fight. I concentrated from the '30s to the '60s, but it did two things. One, it educated our members because really none of us knew much of what I was learning and I learned a whole lot. And I became so involved with the charter members reading their minutes firsthand and in the in their words. And so it really was quite a wake up call for me. And I began to love our history.