My commentary, “What is NARGS?”, seems to have drawn some favorable attention – but it still leaves open the question, “Why should Chapter members join NARGS?” Before discussing the specific benefits of NARGS membership, I need to briefly address the critical, but often poorly understood, relationship between NARGS and its Chapters.
Today we have 38 Chapters that are active in some manner and that provide some direct benefits to their members. Each of these Chapters organized itself and requested NARGS recognition, which means that the Chapter founders recognized some real benefit from NARGS to the Chapters. Today, for example, NARGS provides Chapters with prominent and well regarded speakers through its Speakers Tours. In the past few years alone we’ve shared with our Chapters people such as Josef Halda, Peter Korn, Harry Jans, Pam Eveleigh, Cliff Booker, Alan Bradshaw and John Grimshaw, as well as Jim Locklear, Fritz Kummert, Nick Turland, and Ian Young. The opportunity for members to learn from these men and women is a real bonus to the Chapters.
Each year NARGS sponsors both a Regional and a National meeting, providing the sponsoring Chapters with the financial wherewithal to proceed confidently with the meeting, as well as providing financial guarantees that provide security for the Chapters when they contract with hotels, banquet halls, etc. Again, these meeting are of real benefit to both NARGS members and non-members, since study weekends don’t require NARGS membership for registrants.
NARGS also provides a Web site that each Chapter can use to promote itself and advertise its programs, etc. In short, NARGS provides the Chapters with a variety of valuable resources that make their job of attracting and retaining members much easier.
For individual members of NARGS, the benefits are quite straightforward. First, membership includes a subscription to the NARGS “Rock Garden Quarterly.” Under the editorship of Malcolm McGregor the Quarterly has become an informative, interesting, and beautiful magazine, providing members with articles, photographs and commentary that enhance our lives as rock gardeners. And it is available online free to our members. Frankly, the Quarterly alone is worth the $30 per year NARGS membership dues.
A second major benefit is the NARGS Seed Exchange. Each year we offer hundreds of species, including many that are wild collected, to our members at a very modest cost. The SeedEx is now electronic, so members are able to order online. My garden has over 40 species that I’ve grown from NARGS seed, and many of my friends in NARGS have had even more success growing choice seed while adding beauty and sometimes even rarity to their gardens.
Third, NARGS is reviving its Tours and Expeditions Program, offering our members the opportunity to explore many rarely visited botanical wonderlands at a very modest cost.
Finally, we are developing the NARGS Web site into a portal through which all kinds of rock gardening information will be made available to members. We will be implementing dozens of technological initiatives that will enhance our gardening expertise and will provide members (including, importantly, members who are unable to attend meetings) with access to programs, photographic databases, streaming video of workshops, the entire library of ARGS/NARGS’s past quarterly publications (searchable too!), and many other benefits.
I do understand why some of our Chapter members don’t want to join NARGS. Some have no real interest in rock gardening; some can’t afford the $40 (or $45 for overseas members); and some simply don’t care about the benefits. But I think that, for most chapter members, NARGS membership is certainly worth the money, and I hope you agree. We’re more accessible than ever, more responsive, and more interested in what you want. So please join us and share your thoughts with me and the other NARGS officers. And please visit the Web site at www.nargs.org.
Peter George
Contact me for comments and questions.
[Peter George,past NARGS president, lives and gardens in Massachusetts.]