It started with a broken pot.
Looking for a way to patch it up, Joyce Dunbar came up with a creative solution: piece it back together with colourful mosaic tiles.
“I patched it up on the inside, and then did something pretty on the outside,” she says. “And the pot was stronger than ever.”
From there, it snowballed into a series of plant pot decorating workshops held in the garage of her West Bay home.
A long-time member of the Garden Club of Grand Cayman, Joyce and fellow members fashion the pots to raise funds for the club’s beautification projects.
Joyce serves as the workshop coordinator for the club, organising a variety of classes such as floral design and creating Christmas decorations using natural materials. They sell the homemade Christmas trees, wreaths, reindeer and other holiday décor items to raise funds for the club.
Along with mosaic pots, Joyce holds workshops on hypertufa pots, which are porous containers made from a mixture of cement, vermiculite and peat moss.
“They are ideal for succulents, because they let the water through,” says Joyce. “Succulents don’t like wet feet.”
The decorative mosaic and hypertufa pots are sold at plant sales and flower shows as well as such events as the annual Pink Ladies Christmas Bazaar.
New landscape
Joyce has always loved gardening but found the landscape in Cayman challenging when she moved here from Ohio 25 years ago.
“When we first moved to the Cayman Islands, I went to a flower show held at Treasure Island,” she says. “That’s how I met the Garden Club people, and I started learning.”
An active member of the club, Joyce is also a flower show judge. It’s an accreditation that took seven years to complete, attending flower show school in Orlando. “We had to enter shows, judge shows and go to classes,” she says. “I could go to only one or two classes a year, so that’s why it took so long.”
The club takes a break in the summer, and that’s when Joyce returns to Ohio to look after her grandchildren when they are out of school. The classes and workshops resume in the fall.
Joyce loves the creativity of the workshops, along with the camaraderie.
“I find it relaxing,” she says. “It’s creative, which I like and it’s fun just to sit and talk with the girls.”
Anyone interested in learning more about the Garden Club plant pot workshops can contact Janet Morse on [email protected]
