Our Club’s historical narrative is closely entwined with the legacy of Mabel Osgood Wright, the first President of The Fairfield Garden Club. When Mrs. Wright and her friends founded the Club in 1915, they created a living legacy to their passionate connection with the Fairfield landscape. In all of her pursuits, Mabel demonstrated how much she valued the human connection to the landscape. She also revealed her humble conviction that small grass root initiatives can have lasting and meaningful impact.
In his introduction to The Friendship of Nature, c. 1894 by Mabel Osgood Wright, Professor Daniel J. Philippon of The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities brings Mabel alive with insights into the historical record of her life in pastoral Fairfield at the turn of the twentieth century. In recent correspondence he offered this observation;
“As a co-founder of The Fairfield Garden Club, Mabel Osgood Wright knew that gardens were more than just places to retreat from what she called “the whirlpool” of city life. They were also hybrid spaces, where she and her fellow gardeners could “stick a finger into nature’s pie, and lend a hand in the making of it, besides furnishing many of the ingredients.
“In her work with The Fairfield Garden Club, as well as with the Connecticut Audubon Society, Wright showed that the gardens of Fairfield could be models for our care of the world, in which beauty need not be distinct from justice.”