FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — A botanical garden created over 35 years ago with the goal of inspiring, educating and enhancing the community was the recent recipient of a $500,000 endowment.
Thousands of North Carolinians explore the 80 acres of the Cape Fear Botanical Garden, at 536 N. Eastern Blvd. in Fayetteville, each year.
Educational programs are popular among the youngest visitors.
The newly created Cumberland Community Foundation Kids in the Garden Fund created by Cumberland Community Foundation will help the educational programming continue.
“I love during the day camps, especially in the mornings, just sitting in the classroom and being able to look out over the gardens and it’s just empty, and it’s quiet,” said Tara Feimster, who is a volunteer at the garden. “Sometimes we’ll see some hummingbirds. I also love just seeing people smile, all the kids come and make friends and smile to each other, and just have fun.”
Feimster began visiting here at just 2 years old and is now a volunteer helping lead camps. Her extensive experience, from holiday events to personal camp attendance, means she knows the garden thoroughly.
“It’s made me look over many careers,” said Feimster, who is a rising senior. “At one point I even wanted to be an archeologist due to one of the camps that we participate in here.”
Environmental education is a huge focus at the garden.
“It’s just really important that as the Earth continues to age, and we continue to age and we continue to take advantage of all the wonderful technology and conveniences we have, that we teach kids how to take care of what we have, how to take care of Earth, and how to take of plants, and how to take care of animals and the importance of the environment we live in,” said Sheila Hanrick, the Director of Programming, Visitor Services and Marketing of the botanical garden.
She said they serve between 3,500 and 7,000 children a year through programming like camps and field trips.
“We try to offer a wide variety of programming that will reach a preschooler on up to a teenager,” Hanrick said.
While in Cumberland County, the botanical garden’s CEO, Chris Hoffman, said their educational outreach spans into ten nearby counties.
While various students visit on field trips, some students receive visits from the garden’s educators at their schools.
“They’ll take some of the activities that we’ll have and they’ll bring the outdoors, indoors,” Hoffman said. “So that’s where they’ll have a classroom and usually the teachers will help participate in it. But they’ll just run the kids through a variety of different camp activities that we have for those day activities.”
In mid-June, the Cumberland Community Foundation awarded the $500,000 endowment to the garden to help educational opportunities continue to grow and remain accessible.
“We think about our kids that are growing up in urban environments and for a lot of them, this may be the first time that they get to take a walk in the woods or that they understand in our vegetable garden where a tomato comes from, or everybody likes picking up a rock and seeing that bug that’s crawling up underneath it or hold one of our snakes that we have,” Hoffman said.
Hanrick said the endowment will help fund another position, which in turn will lead to more programming.
“We are pretty close to being close to capacity with the current staff that we have, and so once a class fills up, we have to do a waitlist. We see that happen a lot,” Hanrick said. “We see that happen with our summer camps, we see that happen with our homeschool classes and our after-school classes.”
This summer the botanical garden is hosting about 15 camps, ranging from day camps to week-long camps.
Hanricks hopes with this new endowment they’ll be able to expand camps and the number of field trips they welcome.
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