2013: Odyssey in the Desert : Ridgecrest Garden Club Digs In to Make an Oasis by Town’s 50th Birthday

As the five women were planting flowers at the new City Hall here the lawn sprinklers suddenly went on.

The women screamed and ran. They were drenched.

“You never know what’s going to happen next,” laughed Bernice Butler, 84.

The women belong to the Desert Planters, a local garden club whose 35 members, mostly women between 65 and 85, have a goal “to make Ridgecrest the most beautiful desert city on earth by the year 2013.”

Desert Planters have a 2013 Committee to achieve that ambitious distinction.

Why the year 2013? Because that will be the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of Ridgecrest, 150 miles north of Los Angeles on the Mojave Desert in the shadows of the towering High Sierra, and the 50th anniversary of the Desert Planters as well.

“It’s not just rhetoric. We’re well on our way,” insisted Dorothy Bennett, 55, the club president.

Everywhere you go in Ridgecrest, population 31,000, one sees evidence of the volunteer beautification work by the Desert Planters: thousands of trees and gardens planted at public buildings, schools, the local college, the library, cemeteries, parkways and business districts.

“We plant anywhere they will let us. We encourage all homeowners to have gardens, trees and manicured lawns,” explained Alice Hirsch, the club’s founding president.

The Desert Planters are on a daffodil kick. Recently, they pushed a wheelbarrow full of daffodil bulbs into the City Council chambers that were later planted on the City Hall grounds.

“We’re trying to get people all over town to plant daffodils in their yards to brighten up Ridgecrest and give it a cheerful yellow glow,” noted Marge Daiber, 82, a past president of the Desert Planters. She is one of three members of the local garden club who have been president of the California Garden Clubs, a statewide organization of 286 clubs with 13,500 members.

Four hundred students from local schools planted thousands of daffodil bulbs this year throughout Ridgecrest, a gift of the Desert Planters.

Desert Planters sponsor garden contests, public awareness programs, planting demonstrations, an annual garden show, an annual cleanup day, and a landscape school featuring leading landscape architects from throughout the West. It is one of the most active garden clubs in the nation, winning numerous local, state and national accolades.

Several Desert Planters were sitting in Bennett’s living room recently, recalling what Ridgecrest was like before their organization.

“There were no flowers, no trees anywhere in town. Not even a blade of grass. Just bare desert with lots of tumbleweeds,” sighed Hirsch, who was the first president, from 1963 to 1966, and president again from 1987 to 1989.

Former President Marge Daiber remembered how every time she would visit relatives in Pasadena, “I would hug a tree. We didn’t have one tree in Ridgecrest at the time.”

“Whenever I went someplace that had lawns I would get so excited I would take off my shoes and run barefoot through the grass,” chimed in Butler, another ex-president. “Just imagine, there wasn’t one lawn in town when we started the club.”

The Desert Planters have come a long way. The town’s motto is “Cleaner and greener Ridgecrest.”

“Just look at other desert communities, they don’t have near the plantings we have,” observed ex-president Edna Pierce, 78.

“When we say Ridgecrest will be the most beautiful desert city on earth by the year 2013, we’re not just whistling Dixie,” allowed Vera Appleton, 77.

If their past record is any criteria, the ambitious goal of the Desert Planters may well come to fruition.