Debranski Law

When Wayne came to Reinhardt in 2007, he organized half a dozen more hootenannies but kept kicking around the idea of organizing a professional bluegrass festival, something Mark also supported when he became acting president of the university in 2020. Jessica Akers, who works in development and marketing at the university, helped plan the festival and secured performers.

“We were planning to do the first bluegrass festival in 2020, but it didn’t happen,” Mark recounts. “Since we couldn’t hold indoor events, we bought an outdoor stage and set it up in the middle of the campus, and in 2021 we had a three-day bluegrass festival. People really liked it, so we are going to do it again and make it a tradition.”

Tradition keeps bluegrass music alive and gaining new audiences all the time. Bluegrass is the sound of authenticity, the sounds of Appalachia. Even if we feel removed from that region, the music still touches us in a unique way. Acclaimed bluegrass musician Alison Krauss explains our connection best: “For most of its life bluegrass has had this stigma of being all straw hats and hay bales and not necessarily the most sophisticated form of music. Yet you can’t help responding to its honesty. It’s music that finds its way deep into your soul because it’s strings vibrating against wood and nothing else.”

Jim Gibbs, pictured here, smiles brightly among the colorful flowers in his garden.

How deep the love of gardening runs in

Jim Gibbs is evident to the thousands of visitors each year to Gibbs Gardens, chosen in 2020 as one of the top botanical gardens in the country. The northeast Cherokee County property is 336 acres, and the house and gardens include more than three hundred acres, making it one of the nation’s largest residential estate gardens.

Even as a young child Jim was drawn to the beauty of the outdoors. From his childhood days when his love of gardening was first awakened by his family, to his teen years running his first lawn business, through his college days studying horticulture at the University of Georgia, Jim immersed himself in the pageantry The creator of Gibbs of nature.

Gardens in Ball As a boy Jim often visited his grandparents on their thousand-acre farm, where he walked the land with his grandfather and learned about plants and how Ground believes some they grow, but it was Jim’s two grandmothers and his great aunt who were his greatest inspiration for people are born with his first steps toward the creation of Gibbs Garden. gardening genes Jim’s Aunt Cat had gardens surrounding her home filled with evergreens, flowering shrubs, annuals, and that those genes and perennials, imaginatively designed to enhance the beauty of the land and offer a showcase of color and vibrancy.

grow and flourish

when planted in It starts with the genes. Then it is about nurturing, allowing those genes to flourish. My gardening relatives encouraged me, telling me I was creative,” Jim explains. “I would listen to them talk about plants, their favorite flowers, and gardening tips. That is ” when I realized I wanted to go into design of gardens.

the right environment.

Jim often visited his Aunt Cat and her expansive gardens as a college student at the University of Georgia, building on what he was studying in the classroom with the real-life example of what a welldesigned and tended garden could offer in stunning visual beauty. uuu

each december Gibbs Gardens plants over thirty thousand tulip-bulbs of early, mid, and late blooming varieties. By spring the tulip beds that wind around the property are bursting with color.

After college graduation in 1965 with degrees in landscape design and horticulture, Jim began designing clients’ gardens for the well-established Green Brothers Nursery in Atlanta. The masterful garden designer quickly built a reputation for the exquisite gardens he designed. Within a short time he was the owner of the northwest Atlanta location of the company he helped make successful, and soon he renamed it. By the mid 1970s Gibbs Landscape Company was firmly planted as a leading garden design and landscape business, and Jim’s reputation continued to grow and blossom. Jim went on to design gardens for other people for the next thirty-five years. I have been fortunate to design so many beautiful gardens over the years, some of them large gardens where I could use all my talents,” Jim offers. “One of “ the most memorable was the gardens ” of Dorothy Fuqua, whose Japanese garden was well-known.

Jim was a founding member of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens and originally helped clear the land for the important gardening attraction and resource. While serving on the board of trustees at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, he also helped find donors, two of whom were the Fuquas.

Dorothy Fuqua and her husband, J. B. Fuqua, a politician and businessman, were two of Atlanta’s most prominent philanthropists, and the Dorothy C. Fuqua Conservatory and Orchid House at the Atlanta Botanical Garden bears her name. Her private garden, which Jim helped create, drew visits from many of her close friends, including First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, as well as visiting dignitaries such as the Dalai Lama, who visited Dorothy in the Japanese gardens she created over the years at her Atlanta home. One of the institutions Fuqua helped establish, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Texas, was named for her friend, the former First Lady.

Jim’s work on the Japanese garden for Dorothy Fuqua inspired him, and when he created the Japanese Garden for Gibbs Gardens, he named it in dedication to her for her encouragement of him and his career. “I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Dottie Fuqua. She was a kind and wonderful woman and taught me a lot about garden design,” he recalls.

Another favorite client of Jim’s is Dee Day Sanders, an avid gardener and leader in the Garden Clubs of Georgia and the honorary life president of the National Garden Clubs. She also donated the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center to Calloway Gardens. Jim worked with her on her personal gardens at her beautiful home, Belle Mere, in north Atlanta.

Another favorite private garden for Jim was that of Atlanta real estate developer Jeff Small and his wife, Eileen Small, whose home included thirty acres of gardens along the Chattahoochee River. Jim also recalls designing all the Chick Fil-A headquarters gardens as a special project.

Water features can be found throughout the gardens, and the plants of different seasons add new beauty over the year.

Realizing His Dream

Jim Gibbs is a self-described dreamer. Even as his career unfolded in Atlanta, his dream grew to have his own botanical garden that he would personally design. That dream led him on a forty-year journey to create Gibbs Gardens.

Jim’s journey toward his dream began when he returned from a visit in 1973 to Kyoto, Japan, a city known for its gardens. “I had the great fortune in my life to be able to visit some of the most outstanding gardens in the world. Those gardens inspired me and laid the foundation. But I knew gardens such as those took time to build and cost a lot of money. They also needed abundant water.”