By Coral Gables Gazette staff

The Coral Gables Garden Club will mark its 100th anniversary next week with a historical exhibition at the Coral Gables Library, offering residents a rare opportunity to see how a small civic group helped shape the landscapes, gateways, and green identity of the City Beautiful. The event, titled A Century in Bloom, opens Tuesday, Dec. 2 at 9:30 a.m., and traces a century of local stewardship through archival photographs, personal stories, and early civic projects that supported Coral Gables’ development from its earliest days.

This preview examines the exhibition through the lens of history, civic identity, and cultural continuity—showing why a century-old garden club still matters in a city where landscape design, horticulture, and environmental aesthetics remain defining traits.

A 100-year thread through the City Beautiful

The Garden Club’s founding in 1925 aligned with the year Coral Gables incorporated and began its rapid emergence as a model American planned city. George Merrick’s vision for Mediterranean architecture, plazas, and boulevards depended on something deeper: a horticultural imagination capable of transforming pine rockland and hammock into a lush, walkable city. The exhibition highlights how family members closest to Merrick—his wife Eunice Peacock Merrick and his mother Althea Merrick—stood at the center of this work.

Early images and documents on display illustrate how the club’s first projects sprang up alongside the city’s own blueprints. While Merrick’s architects and planners drew the grand designs, the Garden Club’s first 35 members worked plant by plant, garden by garden, to translate a civic ideal into lived scenery. Their efforts included experiments in subtropical gardening, the exchange of seeds and cuttings, and lectures from botanists familiar with flora from China, Africa, England, and the Caribbean.

The exhibition devotes special attention to the club’s earliest scrapbooks, archived at the University of Miami. These materials give visitors a tactile sense of how residents learned to coax roses into bloom, understand marl and sand soils, and shape yards that reflected both the city’s aesthetic and South Florida’s ecology. At a time when nurseries were few and commercial gardening supplies limited, these early clubs functioned as local laboratories—a theme the exhibition revisits with context and visuals.

Civic projects as a foundation of identity

While the exhibition celebrates horticulture, it also underscores the club’s influence on the civic landscape. Photographs and correspondence show how early fundraising plant sales supported landscaping at Ponce de Leon Junior High School, the University of Miami’s patio gardens, and Coral Gables Elementary School. These projects were modest in scale but broad in impact: they infused new public institutions with the sense of place that came to define Coral Gables.

Visitors will also encounter stories of the Junior Gardeners’ Club—an early youth education initiative that foreshadowed modern environmental programming in the city. It is a reminder that the club’s legacy reaches beyond beautification and into generational stewardship, inspiring children to see themselves as caretakers of the environment.

As the exhibition moves through the decades, photographs return again and again to a single theme: civic improvement rooted in volunteer expertise. This deep civic partnership culminates in milestones such as the creation of new city entrances, the installation of bronze statues of George and Althea Merrick, and the 2018 dedication of the Betsy Adams and Coral Gables Garden Club Park. These landmarks, shown in images and design renderings, demonstrate how a centennial organization can leave literal, visible imprints across its city.

From 35 members to nearly 150: Continuity and change

The final section of A Century in Bloom brings the story to the present, highlighting how today’s Garden Club has expanded its influence while continuing its core mission. With nearly 150 members, many of whom serve on city advisory boards or in elected roles, the organization remains woven into Coral Gables’ civic fabric.

This portion of the exhibition also contextualizes the club’s modern outreach—scholarships, environmental programs, and partnerships with city departments—through curated displays that show how today’s membership carries forward traditions while incorporating new environmental priorities.

The curators emphasize that the exhibition is not only retrospective but forward-looking. The Coral Gables Garden Club’s evolution mirrors the city’s own trajectory: rooted in the philosophy of the City Beautiful but constantly adapting to new environmental, cultural, and educational imperatives. Visitors will leave with a sense of continuity—how a civic group born in the 1920s remains central to the city’s identity a century later.

Event details

• Date: Tuesday, Dec. 2
• Time: 9:30 a.m.
• Location: Coral Gables Library, 3443 Segovia St
• Contact: 305-442-8706, or capleybr@mdpls.org

The program is free and open to the public.