LAWRENCEVILLE: Gardens a place for high school to nurture memories

The landscaped islands skirting the pathways and sports complexes at Central Gwinnett High School in Lawrenceville are meant for memories —- not memorials.

There’s a difference, said Gary Wilkens, who plants, weeds, prunes and otherwise fusses over the school’s thousands of exotic plants. Wilkens, a horticulturist and account sales representative with Buck Jones Nursery in Grayson, started the gardens less than four years ago as a tribute to deceased alumni.

Thousands of plants, dispersed throughout the campus, yield a forest of memories.

“I didn’t want it to be called a memorial garden,” said Wilkens, 58, of Lawrenceville. “I call it a memory garden simply because … I don’t want it to be a place where you remember people who are gone, but also a place where people can make memories.”

The some 2,800 students pretty much leave the gardens alone, respecting the labor and the sentiment. The nursery donates many of the plants, and contributions of work and money keep the gardens spreading across the campus.

Wilkens has become as much a fixture as the crape myrtles, sometimes spending six days a week tending the plots.

“He is an inspiration to many of our students,” said Nancy Innes, assistant principal. “He is truly dedicated. If everybody had something in their life they were this dedicated to, it would make everybody’s life stronger.”

A native of Baltimore, Wilkens moved to Georgia 32 years ago after eight years in the Navy. While training for a job in Chamblee, he met his future wife, Sharon.

Wilkens launched the idea for the gardens with $2,500 in seed money from five prior senior classes.

“We lost one young man my son had played football with [who] was killed in the Marine Corps,” he said. “We had another kid who had passed recently. … I wanted to help influence the kids, to get them to become more a part of the community.”

Many student groups now volunteer to help tend the gardens, Wilkens said.

From the viburnum to the ‘Black Dragon’ cryptomeria, the plots are a living yearbook to students, teachers and visitors. Amid the mulch are black, block markers bearing the names of those for whom the plants are dedicated.

In the main garden, next to the new theater building, there’s the contorted filbert, leafless now and baring its gnarly tangle of twig-sized branches. The shrub was dedicated to the late Bob McGarity, who announced Black Knights football games for more than 40 years.

“Bob was one of them skinny, wiry kind of guys,” Wilkens said, “and when I saw that tree, I thought it was the perfect tree for Bob. He was a man who people absolutely loved here.”

Hundreds of other plants and trees honor retired teachers, coaches and administrators, graduates killed in military operations or in vehicle accidents.

Students took up a collection last year for a garden honoring special education teacher Gaye Pendergrass, who died the previous fall after 17 years with the school. Another garden near the practice football field honors coach Dennis Roland, who died last year.

Other plants are dedicated to the living. A Japanese maple near the main garden honors Wilkens’ two sons, Garon and Mathis, both Central Gwinnett graduates.

“It’s just a chance to offer the whole school something they could be a part of,” Wilkens said.