If you’re looking for a last-minute Valentine’s Day gift for your significant other, the horticulture club has you covered. The group will sell roses from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Valentine’s Day.
“We’re going to have a booth at the Union and then one in Throckmorton,” said Claire Barnhart, public relations officer for the club and sophomore in horticulture. “We’re going to have various colors and sizes of rose bundles that you can get. We have six different colors and pricing is from anywhere from $12 to $60 for a dozen roses.”
Barnhart said the bundles also come with filler plants and a vase.
“Horticulture club has had a couple of work nights this week, and we’re making all the arrangements,” Barnhart said. “So we got shipments of the roses in and we basically just like made it a club event and made up all the arrangements ourselves — they’re all original.”
Participants were given some guidance on how to create the arrangements, but Barnhart said there was a lot of creative freedom.
“There were little strips of paper that showed kind of a step-by-step way to put the arrangements together,” Barnhart said. “It’s like, first you add this greenery … then these are the different ways you can place your roses.”
The proceeds go to the club and assist in providing them with funding for activities, Barnhart said. The club hosts a variety of other sales throughout the year: a poinsettia sale, a succulent sale and a bedding plant sale. The group orders each kind of plant aside from the bedding plants.
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“We do grow most of those [bedding plants]; we take care of them,” she said. “So we ordered a lot of the plugs for those, and then we kind of have to take care of them for the semester leading up to the next sale — so that’s a lot more labor intensive.”
These kinds of sales not only help provide funding, but they also help increase the clubs exposure, Barnhart said.
“Usually we have good opportunities to reach out — like our four sales — and then we do the club activities fair the beginning of the school year,” she said. “The bedding sale is also really huge because it’s during the open house, and so that way we kind of snag a lot of the parents and students from other areas.”
The club hosts a variety of other events throughout the year, including some opportunities for students to network.
“It’s just a really good opportunity for different people in the club the meet people that are of different specializations kind of figure out like what opportunities there are,” Barnhart said.
Horticulture specialities include production, science, landscape and golf course and sports turf operations. Barnhart said the club functions on its own, with a little help from professors.
“It’s really student-led,” Barnhart said. “The professors that are involved are really amazing and supportive and give a lot of really good direction, but a lot of it is student-led — we have officer meetings every other every other Tuesday.”
