Around Town

New Canaan Garden Club, Beautification League Join Forces To Create Wreaths for Downtown

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Ty Tan, a professional landscape designer from West Norwalk, joined the New Canaan Beautification League about 18 months ago, after attending one of its free monthly programs.

This week, she is serving as the league’s coordinator on joint effort with the New Canaan Garden Club to beautify and prepare the town for the holidays. The two nonprofit organizations for more than a half-century have marshaled their considerable forces together to create huge wreaths and other holiday decorations that adorn Town Hall, the Post Office, New Canaan Library, Train Station, God’s Acre bandstand and New Canaan Nature Center as well as Meals-on-Wheels trays. “I think it really makes the town small and beautiful and unique and more personal, as opposed to going to other towns that do not feel personal,” Tan said on Tuesday afternoon as League and Club members placed finished wreaths on the back of pickup trucks for transporting to their destinations. “It really adds that small town touch.”

The New Canaan Department of Public Works assists in the efforts, hanging the wreaths and supplementing the raw materials that League and Club members gather from their own gardens with those the town workers get from public properties. Maryjane Markey, a 25-year town resident who had been a League member and has been a member of the Garden Club for 17 years—this year, chairing the Club’s Holiday Greens Committee—said she was “amazed” on arriving in New Canaan “that our town looked so gorgeous” during the holidays.

Around Town

Garden Club and Beautification League Partner To Create Wreaths, Holiday Decorations for Downtown New Canaan

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The white lights are in the trees on Elm and, thanks to a longstanding effort of two of New Canaan’s most cherished volunteer nonprofit organizations—with help from the town—the village center will be fully transformed into a winter wonderland come the Holiday Stroll on Friday night. More than 40 members of the New Canaan Beautification League and New Canaan Garden Club gathered Friday morning to create the wreaths, bows, garlands, holiday arrangements and evergreen roping that will adorn Town Hall, the police and railroad stations, library, new Post Office and windows throughout town. “Our members are vitally interested in this from both organizations because it’s such a great joint effort,” Jane Gamber, president of the Garden Club, said from the Visitors Center at the New Canaan Nature Center, amid tables piled with ilex bush cuttings, winterberries, pinecones and branches. “We enjoy collaborating together. It’s the holiday spirit and it’s a great way for everybody to give back a little to this town.”

For the past week, members of the Department of Public Works have been collecting the greens and—together with others supplied by New Canaan-based Mill River Tree Service—supplied the makings of the decorations.

Around Town

Beautification League, Garden Club Create Large Wreaths That Adorn Major Buildings through the Holidays

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More than two dozen volunteers from a pair of the town’s longest-serving and most hands-on nonprofit organizations gathered at the New Canaan Nature Center on Thursday to create the giant wreaths that adorn major buildings in town through the holidays. Officials say the New Canaan Beautification League and New Canaan Garden Club have collaborated for some 50 years to create the wreaths—an effort that’s also supported by the town in that public works supplies evergreen cuttings and mounts the creations each year. “It’s a tradition. This is really a tradition,” Beautification League President Faith Kerchoff said from the bustling, sunlit Sturgess Room, which smelled sweetly of the wide variety of evergreens used for the wreaths, including holly, arborvitae, spruce, boxwood, pine, cedar and juniper. Buildings that will get large wreaths include New Canaan Library, the Railroad Station, Police Department, Outback and Town Hall.