Mary Ann McGourty Heads for Warmer Climes

By Ruth Melville

After almost four decades in Norfolk, Mary Ann McGourty, expert gardener and avid birder, is packing up her gardening tools and bird books and moving to Athens, Georgia.

Mary Ann and her husband, Fred McGourty, were, until 2004, the proprietors of Hillside Gardens, a nationally known garden specializing in perennials.

Mary Ann McGourty, then just a backyard gardener, met her husband at a horticultural convention in New Orleans. She moved to Norfolk in 1975, and she and Fred were married in 1976. At the time, Fred McGourty was working at the Botanic Gardens in Brooklyn, editing their handbooks series, but he was ready to leave. His most recent handbook for the Botanic Gardens, on perennials, had been a best seller. That success led the McGourtys to think they could make a living selling perennials themselves.

From that seed, their business grew. They developed Hillside Gardens as a display garden, and they propagated and grew as much as they could. The next step came naturally. Having bought plants, McGourty remembers, “people wanted to know what they could do with them,” so they began to get into designing gardens as well. During the winter they would teach horticulture to lifelong learning classes around the state and give talks to garden clubs. Eventually, their garden had over 2,000 varieties, and busloads of people would come from New York City to buy plants and get advice from the McGourtys. “It was a very exciting time for us,” she says. “We were both doing what we loved.”

An important part of the McGourtys’ work together was “to pass on to others what we learned,” she says. “Fred was a great teacher.” She is proud that many of the young people who worked with the couple went on to have gardening-related careers. Norfolk resident Marc Tonan, who was their first employee—he started chipping leaves for the McGourtys when he was 13 years old—now runs his own landscape design business in town. He fondly remembers the pot of “Must-Go” soup the McGourtys kept simmering on the stove for their workers.

Mary Ann McGourty has many other interests besides gardening. She was an emergency medical technician for 10 years, a library associate for 30 and a bird enthusiast since her children were small. Fred McGourty died in 2006, but for the past four or five years, she has been running an “Ask the Gardner” tent at the Norfolk farmers market, enjoying the camaraderie of talking with people and continuing the McGourty tradition of passing along horticultural knowledge.

Although she’ll miss her friends in Norfolk and the natural beauty of the area, McGourty is looking forward to her new life in Athens, where she’ll be closer to her children, her daughter, Jennifer Stanfield, in Huntsville, Alabama, and her son, Steven Long, in Atlanta. Athens will be an especially good place for her, since the state botanical garden is located there, and the city has a chapter of the Audubon society and a strong lifelong learning program. In addition, she is delighted to escape the harsh northern winters.

Several of the gardens the McGourtys designed in Norfolk are still going strong, although they have evolved over the years, with different plants and different hands tending the soil. As Mary Ann McGourty says, the gardener may be gone, “but the spirit of the garden goes on.”

Caption: Mary Ann McGourty answers a gardening question during her last session at the Norfolk farmers market in June. Photo by Bruce Frisch.