Community, Unity, History, Story

Montgomery Botanical Gardens hosted a meeting of the One Montgomery organization on a bright Saturday morning of September 20, 2025. Marilyn Hobbs, a Montgomery Botanical Gardens board member and member of One Montgomery, organized the program for the meeting with assistance with logistics and equipment from Cathy Maddox, President of the Montgomery Botanical Gardens Board of Directors. Parks and Recreation staff provided assistance and support to make sure the event went smoothly. The focus of the OM meeting was to remember and honor those who founded that organization and were committed to healing relationships to unify the citizens of Montgomery. 

One Montgomery Chair, Wanda Battle, presided over the meeting and introduced the various speakers as well as led the group in the One Montgomery theme song. Dr. Richard Bailey provided the story about the historical connections between Oak Park, Montgomery Botanical Gardens and several notable events/occurrences that made significant impacts on our city. The most significant of those events being the city’s response to Judge Frank Johnson’s court order in 1959 finding that the city’s policies for leisure services was discriminatory and the city could either eliminate the discrimination of those policies or close all the parks. The city’s sad decision was to close all the parks in the city rather than change the policies for leisure services in the city to include all citizens. Wisely the City Council voted to reopen the parks in 1965 for use by everyone.  Montgomery Botanical Gardens welcomes and encourages everyone to visit and enjoy the gardens, a wonderful contrast to the city’s sad decision in 1959.

Cathy Maddox gave a brief introduction to the development of the botanical gardens and offered to guide a tour of the gardens for those who desired to do so.  She displayed “before” and “after” photos of several venues in the gardens to illustrate the long hours of difficult volunteer work that has been done, mainly by members of the Capital City Master Gardener Association, and to show how much the gardens have been developed and improved so far. 

Cathy described a number of plans for the gardens that depend on additional funding. The gardens funding currently comes from membership dues, donations, sponsorship of plants, trees and other items in the gardens, grants/foundations, and occasional discretionary funds from city councilors and county commissioners. Cathy encouraged those present to join and become supporting members of MBG. She also encourage them to make donations to the gardens in honor of or in memory of others by visiting the MBG website or by using the QR code on the signs in the gardens or by using the brochures that she distributed. 

The missions of One Montgomery and Montgomery Botanical Gardens clearly intersect in their focus on efforts to unify the community. One of the main objectives of the Montgomery Botanical Gardens Board of Directors is to inform all resident and visitors alike that MBG is a beautiful, peaceful oasis in the midst of an urban environment that welcomes everyone. We must all remember that there can be no thriving Community without unity.