Fulton Garden Club members are toes into their annual fall cleanup at sites within Callaway County.
On Thursday, club President Diane Neterer and member Ann Wakeman worked on the award winning Fulton roundabout on U.S. Business 54, harvesting seeds and tucking in the native plants for the winter.
"We are gathering seeds and taking them where they're needed," Neterer said. "That will keep us from having too many babies coming back next year."
The work is worth it, as last year the Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri gave the project its Landscape Design Council Award, and the organization gave the information to the National Garden Clubs Inc., which gave the project its Operation Wildflower Award.
Neterer was busy tying sprigs of wild grasses so Wakeman could come along and collect the seeds before trimming each plant carefully.
"Ann Wakeman is our native plant guru," Neterer said. "Any question I have, I ask her."
The roundabout garden is 2,800 square feet and contains more than 435 native species, including purple poppy mallow and purple cornflowers, along with switchgrass and other grasses.
Wakeman said people in the Columbia area have come together to enthusiastically support native gardens, but Callaway County will get there.
Garden Club members are preparing other gardens for the upcoming winter, as well, including one at the John C. Harris Community Center, Missouri Girls Town's butterfly garden, and the Blue Star Memorial at the Missouri Firefighters Memorial in Kingdom City.
Club members recently agreed on a theme for 2018 - "Together We Plant and Bloom," according to Neterer. The National Garden Clubs' theme is "Plant America" and the new Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri theme is "Make Missouri Bloom."
"Our theme is a combination of those," Neterer said.
The Fulton club meets on the second Thursday of each month, generally at 1:30 p.m. at the Callaway County library in Fulton. Each meeting has a different educational theme. For more information, email [email protected].