Love for the birds, bees, trees and everything in between, the Chattahoochee Nature Center’s horticulture team takes a passion for native plants and organic gardening to another level.
Two green houses, rows and rows of produce as well as a plethora of bog plants are all under the care of a select few individuals. Without them none of this would be possible.
“It’s not an I, it’s a we,” Horticulture Manager Jacqueline McRae said.
The Chattahoochee Nature Center hosts two native plant sales a year in the spring and fall. In order to make this happen, they grow and propagate plants year-round. The importance of gardening and tending to plants isn’t just reserved for Georgia native species. CNC has a beautiful Unity Garden full of organic produce from all over the world hidden behind their greenhouses.
Coles McLaulin, the Unity Garden Coordinator and Jacqueline McRae’s right-hand woman oversees the operations in the garden.
Jacqueline and Coles both have their unique stories that brought them to CNC. When Coles originally applied to the gardening position, Jacqueline told her no, but only because she knew she would be better suited for the Unity Garden.
“The job I interviewed was for a gardening person… I didn’t get the job and I got the nicest turndown letter that you could have ever received,” Coles said, “[Jacqueline] was saving me for unity garden coordinator.”
“I think the reason why that works is that things are where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be.” Coles added.
Coles earned a degree in marketing from Kennesaw State University in 1984, then later relocated to Colorado. After a lengthy career in corporate marketing where she ran her own company, Coles suffered from a heart attack in 2013. This caused her to take a step back from matters that lead her to high stress and move forward to the things that brought her peace.
“I’m like, ‘I probably shouldn’t be sitting behind a desk,’” Coles said. “I went back to my hobby [and] started working in greenhouses and landscaping.”
After that, she came back to the east to live near family and began working at Pike Nurseries in the growing division.
“It’s almost like it’s a privilege to be around this stuff,” Coles said. “We’re constantly sharing things with everybody.”
Jacqueline McRae is the Horticulture manager at CNC. She oversees the entire horticulture team, including the Unity Garden.
She was raised in the countryside of England. Love brought her to Georgia but that’s not why she stayed.
“I didn’t come to America for the reasons other people are, like just dying to get to America,” Jacqueline said. “It was just sort of part of my journey, ‘I’ll try this next.’”
Jacqueline speaks four different languages so when her corporate job as a translator disappeared during the Covid-19 pandemic, she made a decision to not be bogged down by corporate stress anymore. Her decision had roots in honoring her parents who were huge environmental conservationists.
“I felt like this was closest to England… because I was in the countryside in this 127 acres so I felt very at home but the decision to look for another outside job was triggered by Covid and the inside and seeing all the news about nature in peril.”
“It feels like I’m making a difference here, and it’s something to actually save that actually has a border, so it’s finite,” McRae said. “You know where the edges are and you can keep working at it… it’s a lot of job satisfaction.”
The work that has been done in the Horticulture division of CNC is legacy. Knowledge, data, and techniques are passed down from previous horticulturists and volunteers. All their progress, discoveries and mistakes are journaled, documented and categorized.
Jacqueline, Coles, the gardeners and volunteers operate like a web but so do the plants and insects. They depend on each other and the efforts of this hard-working team for survival.
This web-like network leaves a big impact across the metro-Atlanta area, across the state, and even the Southeast.
“We’re in Georgia, and we all like birds and we all like butterflies,” Jacqueline said. “We all like to feel like we’re with nature…but all of that needs these plants, these Georgia plants too.”
At the twice annual native plant sale, customers support this effort by purchasing plants native to Georgia which in turn, attracts native insects, butterflies and other fauna. All insects serve a role in the micro ecosystems that are often forgotten about. Many bog plants are carnivorous and grow their pollinating flowers far away from the digestive organ. The bog plant feeds off native insects like mosquitoes and protects pollinator species like the carpenter bee.
Plants in the Unity Garden are started from organic seeds inside the greenhouse, they grow out of a few different sized pots before they make their way into the Unity Garden. Once they are full grown they are harvested and donated to the North Fulton Community Charities Food Bank.
“We have some of the best food growing conditions in the country as far as having plenty of water, decent soil,” Coles said. “You can grow food year-round and most people just don’t realize it.”
Seedlings are donated to the FoodWell Alliance where they are then given away to other local community gardens.
The Unity Garden really is a place of unity. It can be seen through not just Jacqueline and Coles but through the volunteers and community they have impacted. It was a volunteer who created a data spreadsheet which helped map out its layout. This data set is how they plan out the garden
“When I got here, this was their garden,” Coles said. “[The volunteers have] been here a lot longer than me [and] I totally respected that.”
Coles’ leadership in the Unity Garden is apparent. As the volunteers harvested vegetables, Coles walked around giving direction, assigning new tasks, explaining processes and helped the volunteers walk back full baskets of produce.
“She’s (Coles) such a great manager of all the people,” said volunteer Karen Wilkens. “I mean she can keep so many things going in her head at the same time and figuring out people’s kind of volunteer skill sets and where they do best but then trying to train them on new skills.”
Volunteers work different roles in the garden based on their individual skill. Some enjoy the pleasure of getting their hands dirty, others simply enjoy weeding. Even though they are assigned based on what they enjoy, they all learn how to work different areas of the garden. Volunteer, Kathy Franch, enjoys cutting back the mint. Something she learned is needed for mint to produce new leaves.
“We are good stewards of this place because whatever we do here, flows downstream and goes beyond our borders,” Jacqueline said. “We are, each of us, good stewards of our space. It doesn’t just happen at the nature center; it should happen for you too. Be better stewards of what’s around.”
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