You would think, with a crust of January snow across many of our yards and lawns, that it would be time for most gardeners around here to be hibernating.

That might be true for some, but not so much for the 94 members of the Mystic Garden Club, which is celebrating a big one this year, its 100th anniversary.

After all, the club last year in March won Best Float in the Mystic Irish Parade with their live marching daffodils, creating a high bar for this year’s entry, which is still in the secret planning stages.

But expectations for the St. Patrick’s Day unveiling are high, given the centennial celebration for what is one of the oldest garden clubs in Connecticut.

I heard about the club’s big year from a friend, Paul Coutu of Kentford Farm in Stonington, a master gardener who is also, curiously, the only male member.

I know that plays into the old stereotype of garden clubs that are dominated by tea-sipping women in white gloves who rarely take them off long enough to get their hands dirty.

But after meeting this week with Joan Sienkiewicz, an MIT-educated engineer retired from designing submarine components for Electric Boat, I am convinced that this club is a lot more about work than play, and the season for its civic contributions runs year-round.

Over the years, the club has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to community causes, grants and scholarships, as well as the gazillions of volunteer man (er, women) hours, planting, tending and sometimes daily watering, for instance, flower boxes all over the Stonington and Groton sides of Mystic.

Just last year, the club raised and donated more than $20,000 to charitable causes, including a scholarship fund for students studying the environment, engineering and technology at Three Rivers Community College.

Club members seem keenly committed to the club’s time-tested mission statement: “To stimulate the knowledge and love of gardening among amateurs, to share the advantages of association to aid in the protection of native plants and to encourage civic planting.”

Indeed, in addition to the vivid summer display of flowers all over Mystic every year, the club is responsible for many of the decorative trees in Mystic that make the community a more welcoming natural environment.

The club is only in the beginning stages of a significant permanent planting in town that might mark its centennial year, Sienkiewicz told me.

That’s just one of the projects that will consume just one of the club’s 11 standing committees, many with subcommittees, that meet all year and execute the organization’s business.

They also meet once a month as a group, with lunch in a church hall.

The membership, in addition to being mostly female, also skews older, Sienkiewicz said, since retired people tend to have more time.

But everyone is expected to contribute, and even those in their 80s and 90s find things they can do, the president said, adding that the membership has a broad combined skill set brought to use for club projects.

Gardening, after all, is something that takes you outdoors, and by all accounts, Sienkiewicz notes, helps keep people active and healthy.

My favorite takeaway from my January chat with the garden club president, on the cusp of this important centennial year, was good advice for real amateurs like me. Even failure is a lesson.

“If you haven’t killed a plant,” Sienkiewicz said, “you’re not a real gardener.”

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com