ESTON — To be the best one, you’ve got to beat Eston. This is a recording.
A perennial contender in the Saskatchewan Parks and Recreation Association’s annual Communities in Bloom competition, the town hopes to once again keep its championship petals to the metal when contest judges do this year's evaluation on Tuesday.
The SPRA names one winning community in multiple population brackets each year. Since planting its first competition seeds in 2000, judges have given local committee members their flowers eight times, declaring Eston a provincial winner in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022 and 2024.
This year’s local efforts have been led by a volunteer group that committee member Val Mohan says numbers between six and eight individuals. But they’re not working alone.
She says town council provides an annual grant – $2,000 this year – to help the committee buy new plants, and town staff also lend a hand with the effort’s watering schedule. RM of Snipe Lake and town staff have additionally helped the volunteers by hauling in rock, building fences to back certain displays or keeping up with general maintenance of the town’s green (and multi-coloured) spaces.
“They understand it’s more than just flowers,” said Mohan. “It helps a lot because it’s pretty easy for small towns to get a little bit depressed looking sometimes, maybe when the economy’s not as good or there’s a bit of a drought, things like that. Keeping up with these things makes it look like people care about their community and want to live there, and want other people to move there. It definitely affects the whole community.”
Some of the proof may be in the Census pudding that shows, while many rural communities are facing prolonged periods of population decline, Eston’s people count has remained stable in the big picture this century, increasing by one person from 2001-21.
The yearly effort is partly a family affair for Mohan – one of two founding committee members still onboard. The other one? Her mother, Doreen Reaburn.
But it’s also, as with many volunteer ventures, a labour of love.
“I love being outside. I love being outside in the summer. I love plants. Working outside is not work to me,” she said. “I just love getting out and doing stuff to help, and I love my community and I want to do my part to help make it look nice.”
Mohan recalled humble beginnings for the committee, which introduced itself to the community in part through letters that were sent to local service groups and businesses seeking members to form a committee in the first place.
Provincial awards were elusive in Eston’s first 11 years of competition but the group kept looking for new and creative ways to help beautify the town.
“When I look around there’s a lot of different floral areas where there might be a little space between two buildings downtown that was just weeds, and we’d get permission from the town to use that space and we’d make what we call pocket gardens,” said Mohan. “Or we’d say ‘In this corner of town we want to put a perennial bed,’ and the town would dig it up because it might not have been dug in 40 years, and we’d maintain it.
“Every year we were coming up with new ideas and starting new areas that just add to the aesthetics and make the town look better.”
The ongoing commitment eventually led to the first win in the town’s lengthy current run of success, and a town-wide effort that’s proven sustainable throughout the warmer months.
“We want the community to be cleaned up all summer, not just the week the judges come,” said Mohan. “But I think the competition has people a little more aware of things like, let’s keep our parks trimmed for example. Or maybe not just mow but also whippersnip around these trees or bushes and keep things more clean cut. Without that kind of support, we couldn’t do this.”
