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Garden Club’s gift grows from seeds of generosity

By Don Kirkland

The bloom may be gone from their big show, but not from the Tempe Garden Club’s generosity.

After announcing last spring that their annual home garden tour would be put on hiatus, the club blossomed to life this year with the announcement it would contribute $20,000 to build a gazebo at the new Center for the Arts due to open in February 2006 near Tempe Town Lake.

Juanita Harelson, a former state legislator and Kyrene Corridor resident who for years has been one of the club’s mainstays, says the money had been held quietly in reserve, waiting for an appropriate time to put it to use.

“We earned that money from the garden tour, from selling rose bushes and other fund raisers we had over the years,” Harelson said. Money also was socked away from a bequest given the club years ago by its first president.

This year’s president, Julie Ramsey, has continued to keep the club active, even though the future of the home tour remains in question.

“She is a very energetic president,” said Harelson.

Don Fassinger, one of the city’s overseers of the art center project, called the club’s involvement “admirable” and said the result would be added appeal to an already noteworthy project.

Even better, he said, was news that the firm Architecton, which is designing the center, had completed work on revisions to the original garden club design, making it more architecturally compatible with the rest of the project.

According to Fassinger, architect John Kane “came in with a design that was very simple yet very striking.”

It was the perfect complement, in fact, to what the garden club wanted, Harelson says: “a glass top and very elegant and high style.”

As to work on the overall art center project, Fassinger says a contract was approved Feb. 19 by the Tempe City Council that maintains the original cost projections but doesn’t sacrifice quality that planners had envisioned.

“Negotiations went on for two months between the city, the architect, the contractor and their subs, and we brought the construction cost down substantially, so we’re now on budget,” Fassinger said.

“The good part is that we did it pretty invisibly to the public’s eye; we lost nothing in terms of quality and atmosphere.”

The garden club’s gazebo, to be located on the east end of the site, will be a focal point of a lakeside art park being planned on the center’s perimeter, Fassinger said.

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