History

 

The Arlington Garden Club was organized in 1926 by 31 women who realized the need for a social as well as civic organization in Arlington. The club was fedreated in 1930.

 

In February 1933, the club won $1000 in a national landscaping competition sponsored by Women's Home Companion. The prize was offered to the municipal rose garden that showed the greatest improvement over a two-year period.  The city set aside two acres of land just left of the entrance to Meadowbrook Park in east Arlington for the rose garden project.  The prize-winning garden became a tourist attration, drawing visitors from around the area for several years before the Fort Worth Botanic Garden came into existence.  The prize garden was flooded in the early 1950s.

 

Records of the Arlington Garden Club (1955-1998) were transfered to the library of University of Texas at Arlington in 2002 .  The records include photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and programs documenting the organization's activities.  The files include a well-documented scrapbook created by the Arlington Council of Garden Clubs about the Randol Mill Park Nature Area Project (1970-1971), scrapbooks of the Arlington Council of Garden Clubs 1974-1980, as well as a 1972 inventory and evaluation of Johnson Creek by the US Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service.