Written By: Mary Anne Giangola, Hall County
Photo Credit: Don Linke (Click on any image to see a larger version)

The 2023 GMGA conference was a great success with the theme of Cultivating Our Gardens – Beauty, Wildlife & Edibles, in Gainesville, Hall County, on October 13 and 14.

Meet and Greet

Friday evening, Atlanta Botanical Gardens Gainesville (ABGG) opened its gates to Conference registrants. Guests toured the Sweet Bay loction gardens with docents, visited with other Master Gardeners from around the state, and got to know the speakers they would hear the following day. We compared notes on tours attended during the day. Many were fortunate to meet Mildred Fockele, Director of ABGG and Lead Horticulturist of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The evening was enhanced by delicious and savory Cuban food served by Chef Joel Cabana of Gainesville’s Cuban Café.

TOURS

On Friday, there were plenty of openings for guided tours of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Gainesville, Elachee Nature Science Center, Linwood Nature Preserve, Gardens on Green/Lovett Literacy Garden, and Jubilee Community Garden finishing with a Meet and Greet and Gardens at the Sweet Bay location.

At The Atlanta Botanical Garden Gainesville (ABGG), Scott McMahan, Manager of the International Plant Exploration Program, led us through the Smithgall Gardens Asia Propagation Project. He has explored Asia to discover new plant species and bring back seeds to produce new plants. He described growing techniques and collaborations to develop disease-resistant cultivars and plants better equipped to survive climate changes.

ABGG opened in 2015 to develop and maintain plant collections for display, education, research, conservation, and enjoyment. The land for creating the new location in Gainesville was a gift from the legacy of conservation created by Charles and Lessie Smithgall. On a 1996 trip to China, Mildred Fockele, Lead Horticulturalist for Atlanta Botanical Gardens, and Director of ABGG, rescued plants in the path of a dam project, and brought back 125 different seed collections to start the Smithgall Gardens Asia Propagation Project.

Four docent-led tours of the Elachee Nature Science Center and open hiking were options for Conference registrants. Elachee is nestled in the Chicopee Woods Nature Preserve, a geographic location known as the Gainesville Ridge area of northeast Georgia. In the Cherokee language, Elachee means New Green Earth. Part of the 6,000-acre upper Walnut Creek watershed, this area is the transition zone marking the northern boundary of the Southern Piedmont and the southern boundary of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Native groups have lived in the Preserve area over the last 5,000 years, the most recent being people of the Creek and Cherokee nations. We learned of four different ecosystems that exist along the Dodd Trail, saw “direction trees” where arrowheads were found, and how the Cherokee used trunks of the sourwood tree and bark of the black walnut. Elachee’s reptile and bird sanctuaries shelter a small group of injured or abused wildlife that can no longer survive in the wild.

Docents at Linwood Nature Preserve of Gainesville Parks and Recreation greeted three tour groups. Over a decade ago, the Hall County Master Gardeners recognized the esthetic, ecological, and economic value of native plants and founded the grassroots, nonprofit Redbud Project: Model for Green Space Preservation. The public-private partnership of Gainesville Parks and Recreation and the Redbud Project safeguards this 30-plus acre urban forest on the shore of Lake Lanier. We trekked nature trails identifying native plants, (many rescued from development sites,) viewed the forest of old-growth wood, Rain Garden, and Ecology Center

The Gardens on Green and the Lovett Literacy Garden has had a long standing relationship with the Hall County School District.

Three tour groups visited the Gardens on Green and the Lovett Literacy Garden, learning they are joint projects of the Hall County Master Gardeners and the Hall County School District. The two gardens reside on either side of the Hall County Board of Education Office. The goals for the Gardens on Green are to provide a place for growing plants, and to grow good kids, grow the human spirit, and ultimately grow a better community. Offered are scheduled classes for adults and second-grade students, scouting groups, after-school groups, and any group requesting a visit.  Thousands of children have been introduced to growing plants from seeds, growing food in the garden, supporting pollinators, viewing the stages of a monarch’s life, and learning characteristics of trees and plants in the garden.

In the Literacy Garden, attendees climbed the hill from the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill,” complete with a tunnel through it and a well on top. Throughout the garden are podiums with laminated copies of nursery rhymes and short stories.   The educational garden is open to the public in the summer.

Jubilee Community Garden’s three tours allowed us to learn about mass-producing food in the garden…such as over two thousand pounds of sweet potatoes, organically. The Garden’s focus is growing and distributing fresh vegetables to those in the community who are food insecure. Volunteers from local organizations, alongside Hall County Master Gardeners, donate their time and efforts to plant, weed, water, and harvest vegetables to donate to local charities and food banks.