Coupeville Garden Club plant sale showcases year-round greenhouse effort

Geraniums and tomatoes are expected to be the first plants to disappear when the Coupeville Garden Club opens its annual sale at the Coupeville High School gym on May 2, with flowers, vegetables, herbs and concrete art filling the room from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The club’s most popular tables have become a familiar spring stop in Coupeville, where the sale has grown from about 3,500 plants in 2021 to nearly 6,000 in 2025.

What shoppers see for one day reflects work that has stretched through the winter and into spring. Club members spend months growing plants from seeds and cuttings, watering, weeding, controlling pests and timing blooms so everything is ready on schedule. The greenhouse behind that effort, Terry Welch’s Instructional Greenhouse, or T.W.I.G., was bought and set up in 2002 after a campaign led by science teacher Terry Welch and club member Roberta Piercy. It now serves both the garden club and Coupeville School District science classes, giving students a place to start vegetable seeds for raised beds that supply produce for Help House.

That public benefit is part of the club’s long identity in town. Founded on April 13, 1961, with 28 people present at the first meeting, the Coupeville Garden Club began with plantings at the West Coast Telephone Building on North Main and Coveland streets. It started maintaining Triangle Park in 1962, later known as Cooks Corner Park, and extended its work to Front Street for erosion control in 1963 and 1964. The club held its first plant sale in 1968 at the Methodist Church and raised $157.01, then moved the sale to the Coupeville Recreation Hall in 1970.

Those early projects turned into the barrels, beds and signs people pass every day. The club has planted 60 flower barrels, landscaped Cooks Corner, the Coupeville Recreation Hall and Captain Thomas Coupe Park, and kept up the welcome signs at the town’s edges. Proceeds from the sale help fund bulbs and other materials for those displays, tying the fundraiser directly to the look of downtown Coupeville and its entryways.

The club continues to meet the first Thursday of each month at 9:30 a.m. at the Coupeville Recreation Hall, with many work parties on Tuesdays. Annual dues are $25, $40 for couples and free for members over 80. Veterans such as 90-year-old Virginia Brown, who joined in 2002, work alongside newer members, keeping the sale both a retail event and a multigenerational civic ritual that shapes Coupeville’s public face year after year.