Volunteers from the La Grange Garden Club fanned out throughout the La Grange business district to do the work of festooning it with flowers.
The recently planted flowers in 90 planters throughout the business district.
The village provides the flowers and the garden club supplies most of the labor to do the planting. Twelve volunteers did the planting.
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The Village Board in February approved buying spring flowers at a cost of $15,108 from Bella Flowers & Greenhouse.
The flowers were planted in large pots located on La Grange Road, Harris, Calendar, Burlington, Hillgrove and Ashland avenues as well as at the La Grange Village Hall, Stone Avenue Station and the police and fire stations. Members of the village’s Public Works Department assisted with the planting.
The garden club creates three different schematics for three different size pots.
“We plant all annual flowers, including plants that can handle the sun well, like grasses, mixed colors of petunias, lantana, asparagus ferns, salvia, licorice plant and marigolds, to name a few,” Jan McFarland, president of the garden club, said.
“We use a lot of hanging basket size pots for big immediate impact. Everything really looks great right away and even better as the summer goes along.”
The purpose of the flower planting program is to maintain attractive and vibrant public spaces with the intended outcome of supporting businesses, softening the hard streetscape elements such as roadways and sidewalks and to make the areas more inviting, said Ryan Gillingham, director of public works.
Nancy Cunningham, director of the La Grange Business Association, said previously shoppers enjoy the flowers. .
“I get a tremendous number of comments about them every year,” she said.
She believes flowers brand La Grange as a warm and welcoming place.
“I believe enhancements like that create a gateway to La Grange and create a brand,” she said. “It makes a statement that La Grange is not a place to pass through. It’s a place to linger and shop, eat and relax.”
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