Alabama Master Gardeners to bring 2020 state conference to Mobile

Hundreds of Alabama Master Gardeners will gather in Mobile next March for the program’s annual state conference, bringing horticultural experts and garden enthusiasts to the Azalea City for three days of classes, tours and camaraderie. The conference runs March 30 through April 1, 2020, at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel, the riverfront hotel whose downtown location puts attendees within walking distance of Mobile’s historic districts, restaurants and parks — and within a short drive of some of the finest gardens on the Gulf Coast.

Choosing Mobile puts the state’s gardeners in Alabama’s most horticulturally distinct corner. The Gulf Coast’s mild climate, long growing season and subtropical plant palette set the far south of the state apart from the hills and valleys north of I-20, and organizers are leaning into that difference, promising visiting Master Gardeners a look at plants and techniques most of their home gardens could never support.

Organizers are encouraging attendees to arrive early for the Festival of Flowers (March 27-29) and to explore Mobile’s signature gardens, including Mobile Botanical Gardens, Bellingrath Gardens and the Charles Wood Japanese Garden. The Festival of Flowers, held annually at Providence Hospital’s campus in west Mobile, is one of the Southeast’s premier floral events, combining massive display gardens, a marketplace of plants and garden art, and educational programming — a natural on-ramp for gardeners already heading south for the conference.

The Gardens on the Itinerary

Each of the featured gardens offers something the others cannot. Mobile Botanical Gardens, tucked into the woods along Museum Drive, showcases the Gulf Coast’s native flora — including its celebrated collection of azaleas and a longleaf pine ecosystem preserve — and has become a hub for promoting native-plant landscaping across the region. Bellingrath Gardens and Home, the estate garden built by Coca-Cola bottler Walter Bellingrath and his wife Bessie along the Fowl River in Theodore, remains one of the South’s great garden destinations, famous for year-round displays that draw visitors from across the country. The Charles Wood Japanese Garden, a quiet hillside retreat overlooking Three Mile Creek near the city’s gardens district, brings a completely different aesthetic — stone, water, maples and carefully pruned pines in the Japanese tradition.

The garden tours are more than sightseeing for this audience. Master Gardeners are trained to look at how a landscape is built, watered, labeled and maintained, and Mobile’s gardens reward that close reading — from Bellingrath’s seasonal rotation schedules to the botanical gardens’ work restoring native longleaf habitat. Many attendees will carry ideas home to their own Extension demonstrations and community gardens, which is exactly the exchange the conference is designed to spark.

March is also the moment when Mobile’s famous azaleas reach full bloom, a coincidence of timing that organizers were happy to engineer. The city’s spring flower show — azaleas spilling over oak-lined avenues across the historic districts — has earned Mobile its “Azalea City” nickname for good reason, and a conference that overlaps peak bloom gives northern visitors a spectacle their upstate gardens cannot replicate in March.

The conference program itself is built for gardeners who like their learning specific. Sessions will cover fungi and lichens, flowering vines, container gardening, Gulf Coast growing seasons, native plants, recycling in the garden and gardening as we age. The lineup ranges from the scientific to the deeply practical: understanding the organisms that recycle the forest floor, choosing vines that thrive rather than take over, matching pots and plants for porches and patios, and adapting gardens — and gardeners — to the physical realities of getting older.

The session list also mirrors what Master Gardeners hear from the public most often. Extension offices field a steady stream of questions about what will actually grow on the Gulf Coast — why tomatoes struggle in coastal humidity, when to plant per the Gulf Coast growing calendar, which natives shrug off drought and salt — and the conference turns those frequently asked questions into classroom material taught by specialists and veteran volunteers.

Jim Martin, director of the Charleston Parks Conservancy, will deliver the keynote, ‘Gardening Future Forward.’ The Conservancy has made its name caring for and activating public parks across the South Carolina city, and Martin brings a career spent designing and managing public landscapes to the podium — a fitting voice for a conference looking past its own membership to the next generation of Gulf Coast gardens.

Storyteller Dolores Hydock will present ‘Two Gardening Tales,’ bringing her celebrated blend of humor and narrative to the stage. Hydock, a Birmingham-based performer whose one-woman shows have entertained audiences across the Southeast, turns everyday life into story — and gardens, with their failures, obsessions and small triumphs, are fertile ground for it.

A Film Fest and a Remarkable Discovery

A new film fest will close the conference, including ‘Flight of the Butterflies’ and a film by environmental reporter Ben Raines on the discovery of the Clotilda, the last slave ship brought to the United States. ‘Flight of the Butterflies’ follows the decades-long, half-continent journey of the monarch butterfly migration — a story with direct relevance to Gulf Coast gardeners, whose yards sit along the coastal flyway that monarchs use each fall and spring.

Raines’ film carries local weight of a different kind. The veteran Press-Register and AL.com reporter played a central role in locating the remains of the Clotilda in the waters north of Mobile Bay in 2019, a discovery that confirmed the vessel that carried 110 kidnapped Africans to Alabama in 1860, decades after the international slave trade had been outlawed. The ship’s aftermath gave rise to Africatown, the Mobile community founded by the Clotilda’s survivors — a history now being shared with the nation, and one that will be presented to conference attendees through Raines’ documentary work.

‘Our theme is “Gardening with 2020 Vision,”‘ the local organizing committee wrote, ‘and our goal is for Master Gardeners from all points north to know that Coastal Alabama is more than a beach destination and that Mobile is not just for Mardi Gras.’ The theme doubles as an invitation: a deliberate effort to show the state’s gardeners that the coast is a destination for gardens, history and learning, not only for the sand.

Behind the conference stands a volunteer organization with reach far beyond one weekend. The Alabama Master Gardener Volunteer Program, run through the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, has more than 2,000 volunteers statewide who contributed close to 200,000 hours in 2018 helping home gardeners. Master Gardeners complete an intensive training course in horticulture through Extension, then repay that training through service — answering hotline calls, staffing plant clinics, teaching classes, maintaining demonstration gardens and schoolyard projects, and advising community gardens from the Tennessee line to the Gulf.

Extension’s network is what makes that reach possible. The Alabama Cooperative Extension System — the outreach arm of Auburn University and Alabama A&M University — operates county offices across the state, connecting university research with backyard gardeners, farmers and families. The Master Gardener program extends that mission into neighborhoods, turning trained volunteers into a front line for research-based gardening advice in communities that might otherwise never see an Extension specialist.

For the Mobile conference, organizers are seeking sponsorships and garden-related donations for a silent auction, which helps underwrite the event’s costs. The auction also gives local nurseries, garden centers and artisans a showcase in front of exactly the audience most likely to buy: a few hundred of the state’s most dedicated gardeners, all in town with empty luggage space and three days of inspiration ahead of them.

Information is available through [email protected]. With the hotel booked, the tours planned, the speakers lined up and the film fest set to close the run, organizers are hopeful that the 2020 conference will send Master Gardeners home with a new picture of the Gulf Coast — and that some of them will come back for the gardens long after the conference is over.

The Riverview Plaza setting adds its own pull. The hotel sits on Mobile’s riverfront within sight of the port, steps from the historic districts where conference-goers can spend evenings among the city’s restaurants and galleries. Hosting the state’s gardeners downtown doubles as a showcase for the city’s ongoing revitalization, and attendees who tack on the Festival of Flowers and the garden tours will get nearly a full week of coastal Alabama in one trip.

For the local organizing committee, the weeks ahead will be spent confirming session rooms, finalizing tour logistics and collecting auction items — the unglamorous work that makes a conference run. If the response so far is any measure, Mobile’s turn as host city will be remembered by the state’s Master Gardeners less for the logistics than for what they saw in bloom along the way.