Advocating for the Environment

February 01, 2022

Elizabeth Abernathy Hull

Each year The Garden Club of America offers the Elizabeth Abernathy Hull Award to one or more individuals across the country who provide outstanding environmental education for children. Elizabeth Hull, a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club in Ridgefield, Connecticut, for more than fifty years, endowed the award in 1992 “to recognize an individual who, through working with children under sixteen years of age in horticulture and the environment, has inspired their appreciation of the beauty and fragility of our planet.” Candidates are proposed for the award by members of GCA clubs. Chosen recipients receive $1,000.

Miss Hull was born in 1900 in Leavenworth, Kansas and spent her early life in South Dakota and Kansas City, Missouri. The daughter of a leading Army surgeon, she met President Theodore Roosevelt when she was five. “He gave me a white carnation,” she recalled with a smile many years later. After two years at Mount Holyoke College, she left to study voice and piano in New York City. In 1936, she moved with her mother to an 18th century house in Ridgefield where she carefully tended her gardens and worked in her greenhouse for sixty years.

She credited her mother and grandmother with instilling in her a concern for the environment and encouraging her to appreciate common-sense horticultural practices long before they became nationally accepted. She was active in environmental and conservation efforts her entire life, including at the local level where she spoke frequently at town meetings to advocate for and support efforts to acquire more open space. 

Miss Hull held nearly every leadership position in the Ridgefield Garden Club, including club president, which she accepted at age eighty two. She was an official GCA photographer in the early 1950’s. She donated five first-edition books written by renowned environmentalist Rachel Carson to the GCA's Library. The books are now part of the GCA's Rare Book Collection housed at the Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

When she died in 1996, Elizabeth Hull gave much of her substantial estate to environmental organizations, including twenty-four acres of her property to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield, a private land trust. 

Remembered as feisty, energetic, and generous, she was an inspiration to people of all ages during her long lifetime. The GCA’s Elizabeth Abernathy Hull Award extends this inspiration to today’s educators and youth. 

See All News