ATKINSON — With perfumed scents and vibrant colors, the Atkinson Country Club was transformed.
For the first time in five years, the members of Atkinson Garden Club got together for the “Petals and Palettes” art show on Friday and Saturday.
“Putting it together after a five-year hiatus was a lot of work,” Petals and Palettes committee co-Chair Susan Carter said. “But here we are and we’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the whole show.”
The show has been happening for years, said Carter. This year, though, there were a handful of designs much more sentimental than in the past. Artwork done by and for deceased members of the garden club were featured prominently throughout the displays.
Carter had done an arrangement for longtime member Bob Allard, taking a cheese board he had constructed and reimagining it with dried flowers and earth-tones.
One memorial arrangement took inspiration from a lap quilt named “Blueberries for Mom.” The florists who arranged the blues and purple blossoms held a much more special connection to the quilt and its previous owner.
“My mother, Joan Spry, was a member of the Atkinson Garden Club for many, many years,” said Laura Treat. “She helped organize this event. This was her favorite event.”
Treat had made the quilt for her mother. She and her sister, Sharon Skinner, were approached by members of the garden club about doing a memorial table to remember Spry. They both knew they had to do an arrangement to go along with it.
While Skinner and Treat don’t live in Atkinson, the club happily gave them the chance to honor their mother’s favorite club event.
“She instilled our love of gardening,” Skinner said. “We made sure she had flowers every day in her room. Flowers have always been very important to us.”
While a lot of the artwork on display were paintings and photographs, Carter and club member Jeanne Vickery said they make an effort to highlight multiple forms of artwork.
Vickery said there are endless ways to interpret the artwork and translate that into floral arrangements. Her arrangement of a pencil drawing, “Gibson Girl,” focused on the circular shape of the artwork and soft, dark colors and swirling patterns.
“There’s so many things you can do,” Vickery said. “It just depends if someone is going to choose the colors in their art, or are they going to choose the lines. There’s more than one way to take inspiration for this.”