The Piedmont Master Gardeners Association
460 Stagecoach Road, Charlottesville, VA 22902-6441 434/872-4580 Fax: 434/872-4578
A Brief History of Master Gardening
The roots of the nation’s master gardening program reach back to 1862, the year Congress passed the Morrill Act establishing a series of new colleges across the westward-expanding country. Erected on donated Federal land, the schools became known as the "land grant colleges" and offered classes in such subjects as agriculture and home economics. The practical emphasis of the curriculum filled a niche neglected by many traditional academic institutions. The land grant colleges reached out to millions of Americans who lived in rural surroundings and depended at least in part on farming for a livelihood.A quarter century later, Congress passed the Hatch Act, creating experimental stations to conduct agricultural research in affiliation with the colleges. The success of the research programs led to the birth of the Cooperative Extension Service in 1914. That year Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act---legislation designed to encourage broader dissemination of the practical knowledge coming out of the colleges and experimental stations. The Cooperative Extension Service soon evolved into a strong nationwide network of education programs in agriculture, family and consumer sciences, home finance, 4-H and horticulture. County-level extension agents implemented the programs in communities from coast-to-coast.
From 1914 until after World War II, the main audience for the Cooperative Extension program was the American farm family. But the explosive growth of the American suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s fueled unprecedented interest in lawns, ornamental gardens, and small-scale vegetable crops. Local county extension offices in booming areas began to be overwhelmed with questions pouring in from suburban homeowners.
To deal with the dilemma, the first Master Gardening program was launched in 1973 by Washington State’s Cooperative Extension Service. A small cadre of volunteers underwent formal training to handle typical inquiries about lawn care, flower and vegetable
gardens, pesticides, the environment and more. The volunteer force quickly proved its worth to the extension program by freeing local extension agents to focus on more traditional and technical horticulture questions. The Master Gardener concept soon spread, eventually taking root in all fifty states, including Virginia. By 1987, the success of Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Master Gardening program inspired establishment of a Master Gardeners College, a week-long event hosted
annually at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.In 1989, a few Master Gardeners in the area of Charlottesville banded together to form the Piedmont Master Gardeners Association. Other MG associations also developed around the state--some earlier, some later. By 1990, many of the local or regional MG associations in the Commonwealth agreed to form the statewide Virginia Master Gardener Association (VMGA) to share information and ideas.
Today, thousands of certified Master Gardener volunteers throughout the nation work alongside paid Cooperative Extension staff to reach out to the public through workshops, publications, demonstration gardens, plant clinics, telephone hotlines, county fairs, websites, and other special events and projects. For a glimpse of the many volunteer activities undertaken by PMG members, click here.
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