George Briggs. Photo courtesy of The North Carolina Arboretum
By Emma Castleberry
When George Briggs interviewed for the job of founding executive director for the North Carolina Arboretum, it was simply a single-wide bank trailer sitting on a 424-acre tract of sloped, wooded land owned by the US Forest Service. The search committee asked Briggs if he’d done anything like this before.
“My answer to them was, ‘I’m not sure anybody’s done what I believe this could become,’” he says. “It’s such a uniquely positioned place—geographically, academically and governmentally. This is a nexus of so many influences that in some ways, it’s an embarrassment of riches. I think the challenge here is to figure out how to mine that in a strategic and wise way.”
And this was how Briggs approached the development of the NC Arboretum over the remainder of his career: slowly, methodically and with long-term, intentional goal-setting. His strategy turned that single-wide trailer into an iconic regional landmark featuring 65 acres of cultivated gardens, 10 miles of hiking and biking trails, one of the Southeast’s premier bonsai collections, robust educational programming for all ages and more than 20,000 household memberships.
A native of North Carolina, Briggs grew up in Reidsville, where he absorbed landscape architectural design knowledge from his father while working at the family’s boxwood nursery and helping with residential landscaping installations. He attended Hargrave Military Academy for his junior and senior years of high school, then majored in Business Administration at Vanderbilt University before returning to Hargrave to teach for two years. During this time, he met and married his wife Sara, and also decided he needed to choose from three life paths.
“I wanted to be a landscape architect, an attorney or a Navy pilot,” he says.
He applied and was accepted into all three programs and chose to attend Wake Forest University School of Law. He and Sara moved to Winston-Salem and, when he wasn’t studying, Briggs was landscaping around their home.
“Sometime around the middle of that first year, I decided that what I really wanted to do was landscape architecture,” he says. “That’s where my heart really was.”
So Briggs left law school and went on to earn a second undergraduate degree in horticulture at Virginia Tech, followed by a master’s degree in landscape architecture at the University of Virginia. After graduating, he spent the next six years teaching as part of the Virginia Tech Horticulture Department, and then surprised himself by taking a position as the director of the 35-site Nebraska Statewide Arboretum based at the University of Nebraska.
“It was like handing me a ticket to go to the moon,” he says. “I didn’t see myself in Nebraska, but sure enough. I loved my work there, and I learned about what you could do if you look at a public garden as an extroverted entity as opposed to an introverted site.”
All of these experiences—a childhood admiring his father’s complex landscape designs, his leadership training as a teenager at Hargrave, the academic horticulture experiences in Virginia and his time in Nebraska—not only prepared Briggs to lead the NC Arboretum but also made him eager to accept the challenge.
In 1989, Briggs went to the national board of the American Public Garden Association (APGA) and told them he wanted to host the national meeting in Asheville in 2000—an 11-year lead time.
“They said, basically, ‘Are you nuts? You’re in a trailer,’” he remembers. “I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be ready when you get here.’ I felt we needed to give people a sense of vision for what this thing could be.”
In April of 1990, the Arboretum’s Education Center was finished, and the small team “moved into what was basically a tomb,” says Briggs. “The goal became to breathe life into that building.”
The success of that endeavor became self-evident in 2000, when the NC Arboretum hosted the first-ever World Congress of Botanic Gardens at the Grove Park Inn. A thousand delegates attended from all over the world and 30 international associations were represented. An unprecedented collaborative policy framework for plant conservation was ratified at the meeting. The congress took place less than two years after the Arboretum had officially opened to the public.
“That became a consequential event for us,” says Briggs.
Of course, Briggs attributes the success of his vision in large part to the hard-working people who have surrounded him over the course of his career.
“If you look at our statement of mission, we cultivate connections among people, plants and places,” he says. “People are first by definition and by design. Everything else comes out of those relationships in a place like ours. It’s this team that’s made it happen.”
Shortly before his retirement this fall, Briggs was recognized for his contribution to the state and the community with membership in North Carolina’s highest honor society, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. Briggs has passed the baton—literally—to Drake Fowler, who he’s worked alongside for two decades. To mark the occasion, Briggs gifted Fowler a relay racing baton made of cherry and walnut wood, a clear metaphor for the transition of responsibility. But the gift hid a surprise; when he popped off the cap, inside was an orchestral conducting baton.
“This is really the baton that’s important,” says Briggs. “Because the job is to make sure that every instrument in this orchestra is carrying its weight and is getting fulfillment out of what it’s providing. That’s a pretty nice metaphor for what this leadership role is all about—it is about other people.”
Learn more at NCArboretum.org.
