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Peninsula Garden Club creates art for village



Peninsula Home and Garden Club members’ most recent beautification project included mosaic decorations on the four sides of a village trash receptacle. The design included four flowers representing the different seasons. Shown above, from left, are club members C.T. Anson, Gwen Waight and Amy Frank-Hensley with the finished village trash can. Photo courtesy of the Peninsula Home and Garden Club

Peninsula Home and Garden Club member Susan Delahanty is shown at left working on one part of the club’s recent beautification project. Photo courtesy of the Peninsula Home and Garden Club

PENINSULA — Now in its eighth year, the Peninsula Home and Garden Club is known primarily for what club President Dee Holody called its “pride and joy” — the seasonal decoration of Peninsula’s Main Street Bridge, including flower boxes in the spring, Halloween jack-o-lanterns in the fall and Christmas lights and decorations in the winter.
This year, the club expanded its community beautification efforts in a unique way.
“I love to call it an ‘aritification’ project — building on the strengths of garden club membership,” Garden Club member Cathy “C.T.” Anson said of the group’s recent decoration of a village trash receptacle with colorful mosaics.
“[Fellow club member] Amy Frank-Hensley and I were talking to Dee about projects beyond the bridge,” said Anson, a “book artist” who uses reprocessed books as media for her works. “We’d been on a trip to Yellow Springs, where an organization had mosaicked all of their city trash cans. I had mosaicked a piece on a cistern at our house and Amy said maybe we can do something like that.”
After getting the green light from Peninsula Mayor Daniel Schneider to undertake a similar effort in the village, Holody, Anson and Frank-Hensley solicited volunteers from the club’s roughly 30 active members as the plan to decorate one of six municipal trash cans came together.
Found-object sculptor Gwen Waight and ceramic artist Susan Delahanty volunteered, and the group decided on a theme of “seasonal flowers.” Anson added the mosaic project team drew up a template for the design and each was given a season for the four sides of the trash can to design. Anson used poinsettias to represent winter; Frank-Hensley created Virginia bluebells for spring; Delahanty selected sunflowers for fall; and Waight picked coneflowers for summer.
The team of volunteers set up shop in pottery artist Frank-Hensley’s garage studio, with Frank-Hensley casting the ceramic pieces. Other members of the club donated materials, such as ceramic tiles and dishes, for the project, Anson added.
“One member donated dishes that belonged to her grandmother,” Anson said. “She said she would love for them to be memorialized in this way.”
The roughly two-month process involved more than chipping up ceramic pieces and applying them to the trash can, as Waight and Frank-Hensley undertook disassembling the trash can and then cleaning, painting, re-assembling and preparing the four panels to which the ceramic pieces would be adhered.
“I give them the credit for the idea to create a project the garden club could undertake,” Holody said of the project team. “They are great artists and I see this as a gift from the garden club to the village.”
Holody said the trash-can mosaic project also fits the history and character of Peninsula.
“From a community standpoint, we are a historic town and we have a lot of artists,” she said. “It is what we’re about and any time the garden club can highlight that [is a positive].”
Both Holody and Anson said the club hopes to decorate the village’s remaining trash receptacles and also hopes the project will spark the interest of even more garden club members to become involved.
“And we aren’t committed to mosaics,” she noted. “[For example] there is a new process now that allows for photos to be [transferred] onto metal. So we were thinking of possibly doing something with historic photos of Peninsula.”