Mobile is preparing to welcome hundreds of gardening enthusiasts from across Alabama next spring, as the Alabama Master Gardener Association selects the Port City to host its 2020 state conference.
The three-day event, themed “Gardening with 2020 Vision,” is set for March 30 through April 1 at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel downtown, with organizers hoping to show visiting gardeners that Coastal Alabama offers far more than beaches and Mardi Gras beads.
The theme is a play on the calendar itself — a 2020 conference promising a clearer view of where gardening is headed — and the venue puts attendees in the heart of a city whose horticultural identity runs deeper than most visitors suspect. Mobile’s long growing season, its subtropical rainfall and its position at the meeting of Gulf Coast and Piedmont plant communities make it a natural classroom for the kinds of questions the conference agenda takes up.
Members of the Mobile County Master Gardeners have spent roughly two years planning the conference, working alongside Visit Mobile and Mobile County tourism officials to build a program that highlights the region’s horticultural heritage.
Two years is a typical runway for a statewide conference of this kind, and the partnership with the city’s tourism apparatus reflects how such events are evaluated on both sides: the association wants a program worthy of its members, and the host city wants the economic footprint of several hundred overnight visitors filling hotels and restaurants in the shoulder season. Hosting the conference is, in effect, a horticultural convention bid that Mobile won.
Registration is $155 and includes a welcome reception along with lunch and dinner during the conference. Organizers are also seeking local sponsors and businesses willing to donate garden-related merchandise for a silent auction that will help fund the event.
The silent auction serves the double purpose that such fixtures always do — raising money while giving local garden centers, nurseries and artisans a showcase in front of exactly the customers most likely to buy. For Mobile-area businesses, sponsorship of a statewide gathering of the state’s most engaged gardeners is advertising that reaches its target with unusual precision.
An agenda from fungi to film
The conference agenda covers an unusually wide range of topics, from fungi and lichens to flowering vines, container gardening and native plants suited to the Gulf Coast’s growing seasons. Sessions will also touch on recycling in the garden and staying active in gardening later in life, reflecting the broad membership of the state’s Master Gardener program.
The breadth is not accidental. Master Gardeners are volunteers of every age and background, unified by training rather than by any single specialty, and a state conference must serve the member whose passion is mycology as well as the member who wants to keep gardening productively into her eighties. The session on staying active in the garden speaks to the program’s demographics — its volunteers skew toward retirees — while the recycling session speaks to the sustainability concerns that have moved steadily into the horticultural mainstream.
Jim Martin, director of the Charleston, South Carolina, Parks Conservancy, will deliver the conference’s keynote address, “Gardening Future Forward,” focused on where horticulture and public green space are headed in the years ahead.
The choice of speaker looks north to a city whose public horticulture is nationally admired. Charleston’s parks conservancy model — private support married to public green space — has become a reference point for Southern cities rethinking their landscapes, and Martin’s keynote promised attendees a view over the horizon rather than a how-to session. Conferences earn their registration fees on the strength of such speakers, and Mobile’s organizers reached beyond the state to get one.
Professional storyteller Dolores Hydock will follow with “Two Gardening Tales: Becoming Mrs. Nash and Western Civilization,” blending humor with real-life experience to explore how gardens shape the people who tend them.
Hydock, a Birmingham-based storyteller with a national following, brings a different register to the program — the recognition that gardeners are, above all, people with stories, and that the conference’s social function matters as much as its educational one. A story session between the technical programs is the kind of programming that keeps attendees in their seats through the afternoon.
New this year, the conference’s final morning will feature a film festival open to attendees. “Flight of the Butterflies” will trace the life cycle and long migration of the monarch butterfly, while local environmental journalist Ben Raines will screen “The Underwater Forest,” a documentary tied to his discovery of the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States.
The film pairing captures the range of the region’s natural stories. The monarch’s migration — a multi-generational journey from Canada to a few acres of Mexican mountainside — connects Alabama gardens to one of the planet’s great biological phenomena, and the pollinator habitat questions it raises have become central to home gardening. Raines’s documentary, meanwhile, grew out of his reporting on the ancient cypress forest revealed in the Gulf of Mexico off Alabama’s coast and his work documenting the Clotilda’s discovery in the Mobile River — a story that fused natural history with the deepest currents of the region’s human history.
Arrive early: the gardens of the Gulf Coast
Organizers are encouraging Master Gardeners traveling from across the state to arrive early and take in the Festival of Flowers, scheduled for March 27-29, ahead of the main conference.
The Festival of Flowers — Mobile’s large spring garden show — serves as an opening act for the conference, and the overlap is deliberate. Gardeners arriving for a state conference in late March are, by definition, the audience for a regional flower festival running the weekend before, and the three extra days turn a conference trip into a horticultural week.
Early arrivals will also have a chance to tour some of Mobile’s best-known gardens, including Mobile Botanical Gardens, Bellingrath Gardens and Home, and the Charles Wood Japanese Garden downtown.
The three gardens form a tour of the region’s horticultural range. Mobile Botanical Gardens, on the city’s western edge, preserves a longleaf pine ecosystem alongside cultivated displays and is the region’s champion of native plants. Bellingrath Gardens and Home, down the river at Theodore, is the Gulf Coast’s grand old garden — the estate of Walter and Bessie Bellingrath, opened to the public in 1932 and famous for its azalea season, which peaks almost exactly when the conference arrives. The Charles Wood Japanese Garden downtown offers a third register: a formal Asian-style garden on Holsinger Street near the water, proof that Gulf Coast climates can grow world traditions as easily as native ones.
Late March is the strategic season for all of it. By the time the conference convenes, Mobile’s azaleas — the flower that made the city’s identity as the Azalea City — are at or near their peak, which means the visitors will see the region’s horticultural showcase at its best window. For a host committee that has spent two years on the plan, the calendar is doing its own publicity.
The program behind the conference
The Alabama Master Gardener Volunteer Program, run through the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, trains volunteers to bring research-based horticultural knowledge to their home communities. The program counted more than 2,000 active Master Gardeners statewide last year, who together logged close to 200,000 volunteer hours helping home gardeners troubleshoot problems and improve their yards and gardens.
Those two figures explain why the conference matters to the Extension System. Two thousand volunteers delivering two hundred thousand hours of service is a workforce no state agency could buy, and it operates on the Extension System’s founding logic: take the research university’s knowledge and put it in the hands of the people who use it. Master Gardeners staff helplines, teach workshops, maintain demonstration gardens and diagnose the mystery problems that arrive on their neighbors’ doorsteps, all as trained volunteers.
The Alabama Cooperative Extension System — the partnership of Auburn University, Alabama A&M University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that operates in every county — anchors the program, and each county’s Master Gardener association functions as its community face. Mobile County’s association, as host of the 2020 conference, occupies the program’s largest stage for that year.
A warm-up season open to everyone
Ahead of the conference, Mobile County Master Gardeners are hosting a full slate of local events open to the public. A two-night “Landscape 101: How to Have a Beautiful Yard” course, taught by Extension Agent Jack LeCroy, will meet Aug. 29 and 30 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Jon Archer Agricultural Center on Schillinger Road North; the course costs $10 and requires registration by phone.
The group’s regular monthly meeting is set for Sept. 5 from 10 to 11:45 a.m. at the same location, featuring a free program from Penny Smith on plant propagation and white powdery mildew.
The pairing of topics — propagation and mildew — captures the practical range of a Master Gardener meeting: how to make more plants for free, and what to do about the fungal problem that plagues Gulf Coast gardens in humid weather. The Jon Archer Agricultural Center, the county Extension office’s home on Schillinger Road North, is where the association’s public education happens year-round, and the ten-dollar fee for the landscape course reflects the program’s commitment to offering expertise at prices anyone can pay.
Also on Sept. 5, from 6 to 7 p.m., the Marx Library at the University of South Alabama will host Sehoy Thrower of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians for a free talk on the traditional uses of native plants, co-sponsored by USA’s Native American Studies program, the Mobile Medical Museum and Mobile Master Gardeners.
The talk connects the conference’s native-plant agenda to the deepest knowledge base available — the plant traditions of the region’s Indigenous people, maintained by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, Alabama’s only federally recognized tribe. Co-sponsorship with a university program and a medical museum signals the breadth of the topic: native plants as medicine, food and culture, not merely as landscaping.
On Sept. 14, Dr. Stephen Bridge, executive director of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, will speak at Cornerstone Gardens on Government Street from 10 a.m. to noon; the event is free, family-friendly and includes on-site parking.
Bridge’s appearance stretches the gardening calendar in an unexpected direction — the horticulture and history of one of Jerusalem’s most visited garden sites — and illustrates the range of programming a county association can assemble when a statewide conference gives it a platform and a reason to fill one.
Businesses and residents interested in sponsoring the state conference or donating items for the silent auction can reach organizers at [email protected]. Home gardeners with questions can also call the Master Gardener Helpline at 877-252-4769 or email [email protected].
The helpline is the program’s front door — a toll-free number any Alabama gardener can call with a sick tomato plant or a dying lawn — and it is staffed by exactly the volunteers the conference will gather in Mobile next spring. For the organizers, the months between the local events of the fall and the conference of the spring are the run-up to a homecoming: the state’s gardening community, arriving in the city that grows azaleas for a living, at the one week of the calendar when Mobile looks its best.