It takes more than rain to keep people away from the annual London Grove Meeting plant sale.
Margaret Walton told me that she started out with 209 hanging baskets on display, neatly arranged on pipes hung from the porch roof. By mid-morning, there were just a few dozen left.
Margaret told us that the serious gardeners show up at 6:30 a.m., make their selections and then are standing in line waiting to check out at the official opening time of 7 a.m.
We were definitely not in that first wave, arriving at about 9 a.m. After making our first round of the perennials, annuals, vegetables, shrubs, herbs and geraniums, we went inside the meetinghouse and had coffee and breakfast sandwiches. At a neighboring table, Dale Hendricks kept us entertained with his awful jokes. A sample:
Dale: "What's a pirate's favorite letter?"
Tilda: "Arrrr!"
Dale: "That's what many people say, but they forget that a pirate's first love is always the 'C.'"
We noticed that the London Grove Kindergarten parents are getting very creative in their fundraising and had a baked goods table, raffle baskets and several mini-shops set up.
As always, the plants are only part of the attraction: the plant sale is also a big social event. We got to see lots of friends either working at the sale or buying plants. I felt sorry for Mark and Anna Myers, whose field, already soggy from the rain, was getting pretty torn up by all the cars driving across it. (Anna didn't seem too concerned, saying that the field would be fine.)
I'm told that later in the day, when the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, a cheer went up.
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