Q&A: Madelyn Spoll

She may not be an avid gardener, but Madelyn Spoll has served as president of the Longboat Key Garden Club for the past four years. She will step down in April, when Susan Phillips takes on the role, but for now, she enjoys her last few months of her presidency and supporting the many missions of the Garden Club.

Here, Spoll talks about the Garden Club and its 39th annual Home Tour.Q: How did you get involved with the Garden Club?

A: Susan Landau needed someone to put membership on the computer, and I said I would do it. She told me I would have to go on the board. I said no, but she said I had to and kept insisting, so I did. A few years later, I’m president.

Q: Do you actually garden?

A: Do I go out and buy flowers? No. I do baby orchids and other plants that are hard to kill. I don’t like to see them die. Up north, I have pots and I put plants in hanging baskets, but the season is short there.

Q: How many members of the Garden Club are men?

A: There are close to 170 members now, and we keep getting new ones. If you take a family membership, we just assume it’s a man. We have 50 family memberships, but we currently have one man who comes to monthly meetings. We’ve had men presidents before, though.

Q: How many members of the Garden Club actually garden?

A: I don’t know how many actually garden, but we have five who work on our butterfly garden. Our members do like to hear about gardening and flower arranging, but we have a lot of snowbirds, and gardening is not high on their priority list to do down here.

Q: If you’re not gardening, what do members really do?

A: We donate a tree for Arbor Day every year. We also donated money for Quick Point Nature Reserve and Bayfront Park. We’ve helped out the Longboat Library and the old Arts Center...We send kids to camp whose parents either live or work on the Key. We have grants and scholarships that are given, and recipients have to be (pursuing a field) related to the environment. We have about $18,000 going toward that this year. Some of our events are garden-related, some aren’t. I’d say about 40%.

Q: What is your favorite event the Garden Club organizes?

A: The Taste of the Keys has become quite an event, but for the Home Tour, you get to see all of the Key, and it’s terrific. Taste of the Keys is fun to do and fun to attend, but everyone has started to do fashion shows. You have to keep thinking of new things to do.

Q: Is it difficult to recruit people for the Home Tour and have hundreds of strangers trampling through their homes?

A: We get very lucky sometimes. But a lot of people are hesitant when they hear how many people can possibly go through their home for this. 

Q: Do you have to have security precautions?

A: We are insured, so if anything happens, it will be replaced and fixed. In recent years, the owners stay during the tour, and they seem to have great fun. 

Q: How do you select the homes?

A: We go knocking on doors, sometimes as early as May. We always have all of our homes lined up by December. We get a lot of “Well, I’ll do it, but my husband won’t.” We also rely on word-of-mouth. We try to get members to get people they know so they can be familiar and comfortable with this tour.

— Kristen Herhold