Longboat Garden Club's efforts help beautify and nurture a community

Last Fourth of July, the Longboat Key Garden Club was all set for its annual butterfly release as part of the town’s Freedom Fest. The group had raised money and worked countless hours to help bring hurricane-ravaged Bicentennial Park back to life. The night before, President Melanie Dale had picked up 150 of the magical insects from Flutterby Gardens and kept them on ice, each in a little parchment envelope. She had everything timed up. It would take 10 minutes to thaw the butterflies, members would distribute them to kids, count it down and — just like that — enchantment.

Then came the rains. On July 4 it poured and poured — so much so that the event was canceled. Dale took the butterflies back to her home in Sarasota. “Every six hours, I was checking on them and changing the ice to keep them alive for one extra day,” she recalls. The weather improved on July 5, and the club held a butterfly release with about 30 people on hand, Dale recalls. A dream only slightly deferred.

The ceremony honored Lisa Walsh, the former executive editor and co-owner of the Longboat Observer and co-founder of Freedom Fest, who died in September 2023 at age 69. 

The butterfly release is just a sliver of the Garden Club’s purview. Founded in 1969 by Patricia Kroh, the nonprofit has grown to 270 members, with a 20-person board of directors and several committees. The ratio of women to men is about 60-40. “We’re a philanthropic, social, eco-friendly community organization,” Dale declares. The all-volunteer nonprofit maintains an operating budget, she adds, and its goal is to give out all the money it raises. Last year, the club brought in about $80,000, Dale estimates. 

The group issues grants and scholarships (ranging from $1,500 to $15,000), presents classes, conducts tours, promotes environmental awareness and produces a slate of annual fundraising events. They include Taste of the Keys, a tasting event that held its 15th edition in February; Dinner and a Movie at Bayfront Park (tentatively April 24) and the J. McLaughlin Trunk Sale (scheduled for April 8-11). 

And yes, there’s gardening, too. Members work diligently to help keep Longboat Key beautiful. “We have projects that we do where we are covered in dirt,” Dale says, “but we have our events where everybody is dressed to the nines.”

In fact, the Longboat Key Garden Club’s first major endeavor, which kicked off in 1970, was partnering with the Arvida Corp. — a prominent Longboat Key developer — to create Bicentennial Park. The club has maintained and beautified the pastoral 12-acre site ever since. “It’s essentially an ongoing effort,” Dale says. Then came the hurricanes of 2024. “The entire park was wiped out,” she says. “We started with a clean slate.”

Community support was swift, mostly in the form of donations. Past President Susan Phillips led a committee to restore the park. She established a plan. “We weren’t going to plant willy-nilly, whatever looked pretty,” Dale says. “The plants had to be sustainable, salt-tolerant and pollinators,” Dale says. “But more important, they had to be Florida natives.”

Club members weren’t able to break out their shovels and trowels until April 2025 because they had to wait for repair work to be completed and for several rainstorms to wash the saline out of the soil. Once given the green light, Phillips and her crew of volunteers knew they’d need to work fast to have the park ready for the July 4 butterfly release. They got down and dirty, toiled hour upon hour and were able to keep a precious community event alive, albeit a day late. 

Photo by Lori Sax

“We’re not your mother’s garden club,” Dale says with pride. Growing up on a farm in western New York State, “We were gardening for different reasons,” she says. “I’ve pretty much had my hands in the dirt my entire life.”

 Dale and her husband, Tim, moved to Sarasota in 2014 because of his job transfer. She became manager of the J. McLaughlin store on Longboat Key and, in 2017, conceived and opened the trunk show to benefit the Garden Club. For that effort, she was gifted a membership. Dale was first elected president in 2023 and this year began her second three-year term.

Her involvement has played a key role in developing a network of like-minded friends. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she says, then pauses. “Well, actually, the second best thing. My husband is the best thing.”

The 2025 hurricane season spared the Suncoast, and thus no rebuilding of Bicentennial Park was necessary. But the beautification continues, as does the butterfly release. Barring unlikely disasters or an all-day rainstorm, it will happen during Freedom Fest. 

And Dale is going to need more butterflies. Because it’s the country’s semiquincentennial, she plans to have the kids set free 250 of them. 

The club president can’t wait to see the looks on their faces as they open the envelopes and out fly the beguiling creatures.