The Carolina campus is a great outdoor classroom, and one of its most devoted interpreters and caretakers is the North Carolina Botanical Garden. The 23 garden staff members watch over such beautiful, beloved spaces as the Coker Arboretum, the Mason Farm Biological Reserve, and the piedmont nature trails, Mercer Reeves Hubbard Herb Garden, and coastal plain and mountain habitats surrounding garden headquarters at the Totten Center on Old Mason Farm Road. Up to 100,000 people a year visit one or more of these gardens and natural areas. Well, at the Totten Center it s an uncomfortably tight squeeze. The front reception desk doubles as a gift shop, the plant propagation room is in a hallway, the one multi-purpose meeting room is heavily booked, and the small Addie Totten Library doubles as a meeting room too.
Offices overflow with plants, books and files.
An honor-system kiosk out back serves visitors buying native plants. All this is about to change. With classrooms and meeting rooms, an auditorium, a volunteers room and staff offices, it will comfortably accommodate large numbers of visitors and students who show up for guided tours or enroll in the 45 to 50 classes, workshops and field trips offered annually at the garden. In the long term it will help transform what we do both our physical facilities and our ability to bring knowledge and information to the people of North Carolina. Kay Mouzon died in 1998.