Executive Director of the Civic Garden Center
A local institution in Avondale has been the bedrock of the local gardening community for several decades. The Civic Garden Center, located at 2715 Reading Road, was started in 1942 by a group of “civic-minded garden club ladies” looking to help residents create victory gardens during World War II. The idea of promoting gardening education within the community would carry on for decades and eventually led to the present-day nonprofit and horticulture education center the Civic Garden Center has become. We spoke with the garden center’s executive director, Karen Kahle, about the role the garden center plays in the community, the steps it took in response to the pandemic and what it has in store for the spring.
How would you describe the Civic Garden Center’s involvement or role within the community?
Our strength is education—teach a person to fish and they can fish forever kind of model. We have a series of sustainability classes going on right now and a lot of it is to make people aware of the issues. We give them practical information and ideas to live more sustainability at home, at work and in their neighborhood.
When you think about the climate crisis it’s pretty easy to get scared, and I feel like what we do is give people hope and practical things to do to make them feel like their making a difference.
The pandemic seemed to bring out the gardener in everybody. Did you see an uptick in gardening interest and how did the garden center handle the changes?
Ironically, I would say it was one of our strongest years in recent history because of the explosion of interest of gardening and the environment. One of our assumptions was that people wanted to live differently and live differently when this was over. We saw just an explosion of interest in what we were doing and we pivoted very quickly to creating some virtual education. We had been talking about it for years and there’s nothing like a crisis to force you. We created short instructional videos and took our classes online and saw a significant increase in people taking our classes—people outside Ohio even. I am very proud of how our staff responded.
Do you have any big events planned for the spring?
For 60 years we’ve been having a plant sale, our major fundraising event. The plant sale has a great reputation for having rare and unusual plants that you can’t find everywhere. It was always a big two, three-day sale and we weren’t able to have it at all last year. So, this year—this is a big new adventure for us—we’re having an online sale. We’re going to try and have maybe a one-day in-person sale. One of the things that our sale always includes is a “green flea,” so people donate all kind of garden ornaments and tools and rain-barrels and stuff, and we sell those.
