Phew! The powerful Nor’Easter predicted for Tuesday night
is now tracking to pass far offshore!
So, it’s full speed ahead with spring
and the 6th Annual Yale Day of Service!
Join us Saturday, May 10th, 9 am – 12 noon
Elizabeth Park Rose Garden
1561 Asylum Avenue, West Hartford
To register, go to http://yaledayofservice.org/find-service-site/hartford-elizabeth-park-rose-garden
Join Yale alumni from Yale College and the Graduate & Professional Schools, family and friends and the Elizabeth Park Conservancy as we come together in a Day of Service to help get Elizabeth Park Rose Garden spruced up for its 110th anniversary season! We will mulch, weed, and prune – and have a great time working together and getting to know one another! Tools will be provided. Bring your own work gloves, hats, sunglasses and sun screen.
Why does Yale Day of Service in Elizabeth Park matter? The mission of the non-profit Elizabeth Park Conservancy is to maintain, preserve, restore and promote Elizabeth Park. The Conservancy depends on the time, treasure and talents of volunteers like us to steward the legacy of Elizabeth Park. Charles Pond (as in The Pond House Cafe), who died in 1894, bequeathed his land to the City of Hartford in memory of his wife, Elizabeth (as in Elizabeth Park). He envisioned a public botanical park. Elizabeth Park opened to the public in 1897. The Rose Garden – the first municipal rose garden in the United States – opened in 1904. One hundred seventeen years later, here’s Elizabeth Park by the numbers: 500,000 visitors annually. 201 acres straddling the City of Hartford and the Town of West Hartford. Twelve gardens, including the 2 ½ acre Rose Garden with 450 rose beds, and 15,000 rose bushes. Four greenhouses. Ten summer concerts. The happy faces? Countless!
What does Yankee Magazine (March/April 2014) have to say?
“Not far from Mark Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, is a garden that defies all weather. Planted in 1904, just six years before the humorist died, Elizabeth Park is the oldest public rose garden in the country, a spectacle of color and fragrance hidden away in an elegant old city neighborhood. Tunnels of roses converge, like spokes on a wheel, pointing deep into the heart of the garden. There, at the center, a vintage gazebo supports viney climbers, and pink and red blossoms tumble over one another in a race to the sky.
“In the spring I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours,’ Twain once remarked. He lived and wrote in Hartford for 17 years, and he nailed it when he satirized our Great New England Gardening Challenge: weather as fickle as a teenager and just as headstrong. When it comes to growing roses, the effects can be devastating. Past experience has shown them to be notoriously finicky, demanding celebrity-level pampering…”
Questions? Need more information? Contact Susan Lennon ’85 MPPM at susan.lennon@outlook.com.
Our website address is http://alumninet.yale.edu/clubs/ct04/The_Yale_Club_of_Hartford/Welcome.html.
