Avondale Estates Garden Club
Bringing Beauty: Members of the Avondale Estates Garden Club gather in front of Avondale Lake. Photo credit: Jean Kingsbury
“We’re not just a bunch of little old white ladies,” says Patricia Calcagno, president of the Avondale Estates Garden Club, which prides itself on its diverse roll of women, men and LGBTQ+ couples varying in age from their 20s to their 80s. “We’re out there, in every sense of the word. We love to be out there, literally, digging in the dirt.”
The organization offers year-round educational, beautification and service opportunities to inspire appreciation of the various horticultural arts and to promote an awareness of environmental responsibility. Its calendar includes a plant sale, an arborist-guided tree walk and biennial tours of secret gardens, which last June included author and Avondale resident Mary Kay Andrews’ picturesque Squirrel Hollow.
The club’s handiwork is everywhere you look in the planned city of Avondale Estates, from the identifying markers on trees to gardens adorning the elementary school.
“We have adopted the city’s west and east entrances and the clock tower as our ongoing project where we have installed new landscaping,” Calcagno says.
The AEGC is one of the oldest garden clubs in Georgia and, with around 75 members, one of the largest. The Garden Club of Georgia ranked it No. 1 in 2022.
Germaine McGovern founded the group in 1931, when 34 women began applying their trowels to the surrounding landscape. The inaugural project was the iconic – and fragrant – Abelia hedge along Avondale Road, installed with help from the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration. “And it’s still there as our legacy,” she says. 
