CRESTVIEW — The Crestview Public Library, which can’t buy new books this year after city budget cuts, keeps its shelves updated with support from donors like the Dogwood Garden Club, which made a book contribution on Monday.
Purple daylilies lovers can thank Celia Broadhead’s grandfather, Ralph Wheeler, for making the perennial’s variant available to contemporary gardeners. A 1940s and ’50s hybridizer — someone who creates plant hybrids — Wheeler developed the Amherst daylily, a foundation plant for breeders of the plant’s purple species.
Broadhead inherited her grandfather’s green thumb and — shortly after moving to Crestview with her husband, Mark, in 2007 — she joined the city’s Dogwood Garden Club. With the start of the club’s fall planting season this year, Broadhead was named the group’s Woman of the Year.
Honorees can choose to receive a plaque, have a tree planted in their honor, or have a book donated to the Crestview Public Library.
“She chose to receive a book as her award,” club President Sarah Petty said. “It features her grandfather, a pioneer hybridizer of Florida.”
Broadhead selected “The New Encyclopedia of Daylilies” to share her love for the flower that fascinated her grandfather.
“He was also interested in caladiums,” Broadhead said. “He tried a few things before he settled on daylilies.”
Monday morning, she and several club members gathered outside the library and presented the book to Library Director Jean Lewis.
“It is definitely a valuable contribution to our collection,” Lewis said. “Gardening books are very special to our customers, so it is going to be very popular.”
“We also voted to make a donation to the Friends of the Library,” Petty said, adding the gardeners knew the library’s new-books acquisition fund had been eliminated for the new budget year.
The organization has not yet decided on an amount, Broadhead said.
Lewis also praised the Dogwood Garden Club, now the city’s only garden club, for other efforts on behalf of the library.
“They decorate with the greenery in the meeting room and in the lobby,” Lewis said. “They keep us looking good. It’s wonderful to have such talented partners.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Garden club contributes to cash-strapped library's offerings