Visitors were treated to 93 entries, including underwater floral arrangements, a fairy garden farm, and one that featured shoes in its design — all to evoke this year’s theme, “Memories of Mama.”

“We’ve had a good show — good turnout,” said co-chair Rita Milberger. “There were a lot of entries this year. Big variety.”

Each year the show leaders come up with a theme, and then all the categories that fit under the theme.

“Most of it is up to the imagination,” Milberger said.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Martha Anderson, of San Francisco, looks over the leaves and greenery in the horticulture division of the Fort Dodge Federated Garden Club’s show Sunday. Anderson was impressed, saying northern California also has beautiful flowers.

Pam Gollob, of Otho, used her imagination to walk into both the award of design excellence and the designer’s choice award, for an arrangement featuring lilies in a pair of antique shoes.

“It’s very unique,” club member Lucy Larson, of Fort Dodge, said.

“It also goes with the theme so well,” Skip Thompson added. “The theme was ‘Walking into Town.’ So you think, OK, remembering mama, those would be shoes of that era.”

“I remember my grandma wearing shoes like that,” Larson said.

Milberger entered four arrangements in the design category herself, and probably 15 in horticulture, she said. While design requires the entrant to make a creation using flowers and items, in horticulture they have to grow the plants themselves.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Ron Lanning, left, and Sherry Lanning, of Humboldt, and Teresa Gross of Fort Dodge brows the rows of greenery on display on the horticulture side of the FDFGC show Sunday. The ‘design’ category elsewhere in the mall required entrants to create an arrangement, while horticulture features plants the club members grew themselves.

Visiting with her husband and some friends, Sherry Lanning of Humboldt said she was “amazed” at the variety.

“They have knocked our socks off with these flowers,” said Martha Anderson. “I live in San Francisco. San Francisco and northern California is full of beautiful flowers.”

Lanning’s husband Ron Lanning said he didn’t know a thing about flowers. But he’d found some plants he liked on display here.

“That’s the point, to give people ideas about what to grow,” Milberger said. “What they like.”

Milberger’s co-chair, Nancy Phillips, took home a blue ribbon in one category. She explained how she’d brought together the tub and flowers for the theme “Wash on Monday.”

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Maybe it’s a fairy farmer? This entry from Shirley Wolf, of Farnhamville, with its succulents and greenery along with a full miniature farm scene, took first place in the Fairy Garden category at the FDFGC show Sunday.

“When you’re doing a design you try to do a line,” Phillips said, showing how the angle of her display catches the eye. “The white makes you think of the bubbles, and the washing.”

These pair with purple flowers, evocative of scrub brushes.

The Federated Garden Club meets the third Tuesday of every month, Milberger said, and can always use new members. The next meeting will feature a tour of some members’ gardens.

The big annual tour of gardens will be held July 6, and will be a twilight tour again this year.

“People liked it last year, so we decided to do it again,” Marilyn Peterson-Shipp said.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Pam Gollob, of Otho, took both the Designer’s Choice and the Design Excellence awards for her entry in the ‘Walking into Town’ category.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Nancy Phillips explains how she composed her blue-ribbon winning arrangement for the FDFGC show Sunday. For the “wash on Monday” theme, Phillips used a metal tub, plus bubbly white flowers to evoke soapsuds and purple blooms shaped like scrub brushes.