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.

But what happens when they want to come indoors? When, for example, the annual Sculpture in the Garden exhibit packs ’em in at the Totten Center? Or a public class on landscaping with native plants draws a crowd? Or UNC students take a break from walking the nearby nature trails and search the center for a drink machine?

Well, at the Totten Center it’s an uncomfortably tight squeeze. The 5,000-square-foot concrete-block building is cheerful but spartan, and staff and visitors shoehorn themselves in, out and around each other every day. 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. House-proud the Bot Garden is not!

All this is about to change.

A $2.6 million bequest by Katherine Bradley Mouzon, a volunteer tour guide at the garden for 25 years, will hasten the building of a long-planned visitor education center. 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.

"Kay’s gift sent our spirits soaring," says NCBG director Peter White. "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. In the year before her death, despite a recurrence of cancer, she was still leading visitors on tours of the garden.

"Kay was a lifelong learner about plants and nature," White says. "She was a joyful, sparkling, warm person, she devoted herself to others, and she delighted in plants up to the very end. She and Olin (her late husband) both gave important volunteer service to the garden during their lifetimes. This bequest, which they planned together, is their ultimate gift to North Carolinians and others who love gardens and seek knowledge about plants and nature."

In 1992, the North Carolina Botanical Garden produced a master plan for development, which called for both a visitor education center and a herbarium building but left open the question of their funding. The Mouzon bequest will meet about half of the visitor education center construction cost, and the plan is to finish funding the building with private gifts and grants. Recent major commitments by Else R. Couch, the Chapel Hill Garden Club, William Garwood, Alan and Marguerite MacIntyre, Bob and Betty Rugh and the Reeves Foundation bring the total of private gifts, grants and pledges to $3 million. Fund-raising will continue toward the $5 million goal, says Charlotte Jones-Roe, NCBG’s assistant director for development, and the garden is hiring a team of architects.

"Our garden is about North Carolina," says Peter White, "and the visitor education building will interpret the wonderful diversity of plants in North Carolina and their value in our lives."

White says the building also will welcome North Carolinians to UNC-CH. The N.C. Botanical Garden is one of the University’s major public outreach centers, along with the Morehead Planetarium, the Ackland Art Museum and WUNC radio. The building, White says, should make all feel welcome — volunteers, horticultural therapy clients, garden clubs from around the state, public school teachers and their classes, Carolina students, workshop participants, visiting scientists and drop-in visitors — and it should invite them to enter the gardens and nature trails surrounding the center.

Conservation is a crucial part of the NCBG’s mission, so the visitor center is planned to be a "green" building that demonstrates sustainable development — in line, White says, with Gov. Jim Hunt’s 1998 call for state agencies to lead the way in sustainable use of resources. Green in this case means a building carefully sited to minimize tree cutting and designed to reduce rainwater runoff to zero, incorporate recycled and recyclable building materials, and use renewable energy sources. (One possibility is geothermal heating and cooling via a closed system of underground water pipes.) The building also is likely to contain some traditional North Carolina design elements such as porches and generous roof overhangs.

Katherine Bradley was born in 1917 and grew up a rather sheltered only child in Forest City in Rutherford County, says Jones-Roe. But Kay Bradley blossomed intellectually and socially at Greensboro College, where she joined the orchestra, the choir and the science and hiking clubs. She met her future husband, Olin T. Mouzon, at Lake Junaluska, where she was taking a summer course offered by Duke University. They married in 1939. Almost 10 years later she earned a second bachelor’s degree, in library science, from Carolina.

Olin Mouzon Ph.D. ’40 joined the UNC-CH faculty in economics and commerce in 1939 and spent his entire academic career at Carolina except for four years in the War Department in Washington, D.C. during World War II. He wrote three books, was a good teacher, and took an active part in the Chapel Hill community. He served the Botanical Garden’s administrative board as treasurer and helped put the garden on a sound financial footing in its early years. Olin Mouzon died in 1983.

Kay Mouzon, like her husband, poured her considerable energy and intelligence into volunteer work at the garden and elsewhere. For a quarter of a century she led visitors on garden tours. She also volunteered in the UNC Herbarium, a reference collection of dried plant specimens that is analogous to a library (and which eventually will be housed at the N.C. Botanical Garden); there she mounted and sorted specimens and put the reprint collection in order.

Kay Mouzon also gave generously to the herbarium and NCBG. She established the Friends of the Herbarium donors’ organization and in her will left $25,000 for an endowment to support research and publications by students, staff and faculty who use herbarium materials. She gave the garden $15,000 to purchase dissecting microscopes and a teaching microscope with video monitor for use in the plant families classes she so enjoyed taking — and which were taught by the herbarium curator Jim Massey. (She also left $100,000 to establish an endowment to provide need-based scholarships for undergraduates — the Olin T. and Katherine B. Mouzon Memorial Fund — in the College of Arts and Sciences.)

Kay Mouzon approached learning about wildflowers with a rigor most people lack, says Charlotte Jones-Roe. "Precise" is a word several people use to describe her mind. Peter White took advantage of her exceptionally careful proofreading and editing skills. White says she delighted in finding misplaced whiches and thats in the manuscript of his Smoky Mountain wildflower guide. When Jim Massey visited Kay in the last week of her life, together they carefully keyed out the plant families represented in a large bouquet of flowers in her room. He captured her drive to enjoy and identify plants in a poem, "Remembering Kay," with these lines:

She chuckles along the bear trail in the Smokies

where we wondered which path to take

to not disturb the mother and her cub!

But where we so wanted to know what that fern was.

Ken Moore, the garden’s assistant director for collections, programs and operations, wrote a vivid tribute to Kay Mouzon’s memory in the NCBG Newsletter (May-June 1998). He recalled Kay as one of the very first participants in wildflower walks at the garden and described her curiosity about all she saw. He ended,

    Once in a while during our life experience, we are touched by individuals who pass among us so quietly and yet so memorably that we are hardly aware of how blessed we are. For me, I always will be particularly aware of Kay as I notice the dozens of species of goldenrod flowering on our roadsides from midsummer through early winter. For others, she will be remembered especially with the sight or song of a bird, a rendering of a piece of classical music, the viewing of herbarium specimens, or simply remembering that Kay demonstrated how fully one can experience and share this life on earth and then gracefully move on. How fortunate for us that Kay was for so long a real part of the Garden family and that her reverence for life continues to accompany us along our garden paths.

— Ginger Travis ’78

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