Riverhead Rotary Garden Festival digs in at Tanger
A kaleidoscope of spring colors — periwinkle foxglove, purple velvety pansies, vibrant yellow begonias, and white- and salmon-hued impatiens, among others — greeted plant lovers at the 29th annual East End Garden Festival opening day on Sunday, May 4, at the Tanger Outlets. Japanese maple trees, countless varieties of shrubs, flowering fruit trees, flat upon flat of small marigolds and miscellaneous houseplants all beckoned to be in someone’s garden.
Organized by the Riverhead Rotary, the festival runs all week until Mother’s Day, May 11, at Tanger Outlets from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. While the focus is beautifying gardens, the gardenias, sculpted lavender plants, petunias, marigolds and many more varieties available provide several charities on the North Fork with thousands of dollars in funding.
“This is the 29th year and it gets bigger every year,” said Dr. Rajesh Patel, a member of the Riverhead Rotary’s Garden festival committee and a private practice pulmonologist in Riverhead. “Everything from flowers to flats are donated. We start working months in advance — getting permits for the big tent, going out to local growers and nurseries, coordinating the deliveries and setting up the entire project.”
The Rotary has roughly 50 members who work in shifts during the eight days of the garden festival, and volunteers from the Riverhead ROTC and Timothy Hill Ranch pitch in too. Last year, the event raised $250,000, proceeds that go to the Rotary, Peconic Bay Medical Center and Operation International, of which Dr. Patel is a member.
“Operation International has been in existence for 27 years providing free medical missions in 29 countries to perform major surgery in all specialties: dental, EMT, neurosurgery and gynecology to name a few. We were just in Laos in March and we performed 100 surgeries,” said Dr. Patel.
He said the Rotary will also use the proceeds to support East End community projects such as food pantries, Toys for Tots, scholarships and Christmas and Thanksgiving baskets to the needy.
“For all the people who come and buy even a single plant, it touches someone’s life and that’s a wonderful thing. It changes someone’s life for the positive and their livelihoods,” Dr. Patel said.
Pushing a cart with an oversized bright red geranium and two peonies, Greg Brown came all the way from Sag Harbor as he’s done for five consecutive years. “They’ve got good deals and I want to support the health facilities,” he said.
Gesturing to his plants he kidded that “the perennials look great now, but if the deer are hungry, the plants might get eaten — but they’ll come back next year even stronger!”
Gardening-lover Maureen Karpilovsky of Calverton was loading up her cart too.
“I donated $200 to the Rotary, so that gives me $300 in Rotary dollars to spend here,” she said. Ms. Karpilovsky also said the red and dark pink mandevillas she bought are going to be gifts for her daughters-in-law come Mother’s Day.
Spending the day at the festival with his “nana and papa,” 12-year-old Avery Masem of East Northport had his eye on the rhododendrons. “I like having my hands in the dirt,” he said.
The first woman president of the Riverhead Rotary in the 1980s and a current Rotary garden committee member, Sherry Patterson said the festival is the first sign of spring for plant-lovers.
“We get people who come every year as we’re transitioning into the warmer weather. The raffle tickets go very quickly, everything is reasonably priced and I think people feel good knowing they are supporting the Rotary,” she said.
Pulling it all together is a major undertaking. The tables get set up Thursday night, and the trucks start coming in the Friday before the opening, loaded with donations from as far away as New Jersey.
“Joe Van de Wetering started it all with Central Suffolk Hospital 29 years ago. Then his brother Jack asked the Riverhead Rotary to take it over when the hospital no longer had the manpower to run it, and we’ve been doing it ever since. Jack, who is 84, actually flies to New Jersey to bring Snowflake ice cream and Briermere’s pies to the nurseries where the big truckloads come from as a thank you to the people who are loading the trucks,” said Ms. Patterson. She said that he also does that with many of the local nurseries.
One volunteer who has seen it all come together many times is Judy Barth, a festival volunteer for 28 years.
“I like the people here. I’m the veteran. It’s just what I do because I can!” she joked. The former owner of a gardening business on what is now Wendy’s in Riverhead, “this event gives me my yearly fix of retail gardening!”
