Mary Beth Kelly didn’t just have a green thumb. According to her grandson, Eugene O’Donnell of Marietta, she “had fingers like E.T.”
“Whatever Mom grew — flowers, ornamentals, vegetables — the results were outstanding. She often talked to her plants to give them encouragement,” said her daughter, Suzanne Kelly of Smyrna.
In addition, Mary Beth Kelly created exquisite floral designs, winning the Garden Club of Georgia’s Flower Arranger of the Year award numerous times from 1982 onward. The club’s president, Caroline Silcox of Gainesville, said Kelly was excellent at several forms of design — traditional, contemporary and Japanese.
Geri Laufer of Atlanta, a freelance garden writer and frequent garden commentator on WABE’s “City Cafe” noontime show, called Kelly’s floral designs “a refinement on nature.” She said she still could picture in her mind a combination by Kelly of miniature daffodils, ferns and a moss-covered log — “all very tiny and very beautiful.”
A consistent winner of an annual Christmas decorating competition when she and her family lived in Buckhead, Kelly turned off her outdoor Christmas lights one year during the judging period so that someone else in her neighborhood could enjoy the honor, her daughter said.
Mary Elizabeth Eberhardt Kelly, 91, of Smyrna died of heart failure Monday at Emory University Hospital. A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Feb. 16 at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church. West Georgia Crematory, Austell, is in charge of arrangements.
Kelly was born and grew up in Carlton, where she met her husband-to-be, Wade Hampton Kelly. After their marriage in 1942, he went off to war and she moved to Atlanta to attend a school for beauticians. Throughout his four years in the U.S. Army Air Corps, she saved the better part of his monthly military pay. When he returned to civilian life, that enabled him to start Kelly Clutch Co., an Atlanta firm servicing tractor trailer trucks that is still in operation.
In the late 1970s Mary Beth Kelly traveled to Kyoto, Japan, to take three months of instruction at the Ikenobo Ikebana School of plant design.
She learned the Japanese mode of arranging well, said Betty Benson of Douglasville, a Garden Club of Georgia board member. “There’s a special meaning to the placement of stems. They must be arranged exactly so, and Mary Beth was good at that,” she said.
Afterward, when Japanese master arrangers came to Atlanta periodically to demonstrate their art, they often called on Kelly to provide them with local plant material for their exhibitions.
Her daughter said she recently found the following sentence written by her mother in the margin of one of her Japanese flower arrangement books: “To create beauty and to share with others one’s personal grasp of its nature are the twin forces that motivate all true artistic flower arrangers.”
In another book she wrote, “Always be good to the ground because it’s holy.”
Survivors include her husband and daughter; two sons, Wade Hampton Kelly Jr. of Smyrna and Weldon Griffin Kelly of Marietta; and three grandchildren.
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