East Lyme — The carefully tended and artfully arranged flower beds of the Garden Club are giving way to a wild array of native plants as the 72-year-old organization cedes control to a new generation of horticulturalists.

The East Lyme Garden Club disbanded at the end of 2021 in a unanimous vote of the six members who had grown older and more fatigued in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They handed over a majority of their savings to Pollinator Pathway East Lyme through a $4,000 donation to the grassroots organization started last summer by resident Marjorie Meekhoff.

Now, work at the three public gardens tended for all those years by the Garden Club will focus less on making them attractive for humans and more on luring pollinators — including bees, butterflies and hummingbirds — that are in decline because of development and pesticides.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some scientists estimate that one out of every three bites of food we eat exists because of pollinators. Pollinators rely on native plants as a source of food and a place to live.

Meekhoff said her group will leave many of the Garden Club's original plantings but gradually will incorporate native species to attract the important insects.

Jean Hamilton, president of the garden club for 17 years, said it had become difficult for the few remaining members to care for the gardens at the library, senior center and historic Thomas Lee House and Museum. "We had to pay people to do the weeding we used to do ourselves," she said.

Efforts to recruit new members didn't work, according to Hamilton: not changing the time of the monthly meeting, not appointing volunteer publicity coordinators and not soliciting new members at the club's popular May Mart fundraiser on the Saturday before Mother's Day.

Roberta Levandoski, a member of the Garden Club since 1975, said there were 47 members back then. "It was a very busy, active group," she said. "But a lot of women didn't work. And a lot of the women were married to professional men and didn't have to work." She, herself, was a night-shift nurse, so the 10 a.m. monthly meetings that catered to the housewife suited her schedule as well.

Hamilton said the club's traditional bent could be seen in the list of past presidents printed in the annual program. For decades it was largely dominated by women who referred to themselves by their husband's name, starting with Mrs. John Carstens in 1950 — until the newest president added herself to the list as Ms. Jean Hamilton in 2004.

Levandoski jokingly referred to it as a revolution. Hamilton acknowledged with a laugh that change was late in coming to the Garden Club.

In addition to tending the gardens, Hamilton said members were responsible for growing at least 20 plants for the popular May Mart sale that served as the only annual fundraiser. Monthly speakers educated members on issues ranging from different types of gardens to flowers to herbs to deer repellant. Lunches at members' gardens or dinners in their homes were popular social outlets.

Hamilton said she moved to East Lyme from New Jersey in 1999 "and had no idea how to garden with all these rocks." So she joined the club and soon had members showing up in her yard to show her what to do.

"The best thing I ever did when I moved to East Lyme was to join the Garden Club," she said. "I'm so sad that we can no longer continue."

Now, Pollinator Pathway East Lyme volunteers will pick up where the Garden Club left off. That means focusing on native plants that pollinators need to survive, including milkweed for monarch butterflies on the verge of extinction.

Members have started testing different methods in their first experimental station in the traffic circle on Industrial Park Road, which signs identify as a Pollinator Pathway Restoration area.

Efforts include introducing native plants, pulling out nonnative grasses like mugwort, and letting the grass grow. She said the Public Works Department has stopped mowing the area at her request. Public Works Department Director Joe Bragaw said the arrangement will continue as long as there are no sightline issues from the taller grass and plantings.

Meekhoff said she saw for herself — and captured on camera in her excitement — a monarch butterfly and a great golden digger wasp drawn to the industrial park traffic circle by native plants.

Pollinator Pathway East Lyme, which started in August with $700 in donations to pay for seeds to plant a 2-acre field near the Giving Garden on Church Lane, has since incorporated as a federally recognized nonprofit organization. Meekhoff said the goal revolves around conservation, education and education by promoting pollinator-friendly habitats on public and private land.

"It's the little things that are running our world," Meekhoff said. "If we don't have these insects, life as we know it won't be the same. We won't have fresh blueberries or peaches or tomatoes."

The multistate Pollinator Pathway project originated in Wilton in 2016 based on the ecological philosophy of Oregon-based artist Sarah Bergmann. Since then, more than 70 chapters have sprouted up across the state. According to the organization's website, the program has expanded throughout the Northeast and into Oregon as well as Ontario, Canada.

Both Meekhoff and Hamilton acknowledged native gardens look different from the traditional Garden Club variety.

Meekhoff said there were some complaints from residents that the industrial park traffic circle looked "messy" in its relatively wild state. That's when she put up the signs identifying it as a restoration area to help with the group's goal of educating the public about pollinators.

According to Hamilton, bringing back pollinators will rely on educating people on the issue and helping to reframe their expectations about what a garden should look like. It's a natural progression, she said: "The garden club got people excited about gardening and planting and flowers. And now we move to the next level, which is Pollinator Pathway."

The way Hamilton described it, being an environmentally conscious gardener is not always pretty.

"It's hard work and it's not always pinks and yellows," she said. "Sometimes it's brown, and it needs to be brown because something's going to be living on it."

That means there's going to be a departure from the Garden Club's focus on putting together bouquets for the library or delivering baskets to homebound seniors for Mother's Day and Christmas.

"We may not have floral arrangements anymore — like we don't have men's first names — but we have the bees and the butterflies living," Hamilton said.

e.regan@theday.com