Stormy weather didn’t deter the Azalea Garden Club, or its numerous guests, from gathering under the Franke Pavilion at Pendleton King Park on Sunday afternoon for its Blooming Garden Stroll, to commemorate the completed restoration of the park’s Azalea Walk entrance.
The Walk Entrance Project was the result of several donations and grants, including from the Pendleton King Park Foundation Board, the Augusta Council of Garden Clubs, the Greenbrier and Gateway Garden clubs, the Georgia Rehabilitation Institute and Pinnacle Bank.
The Azalea Garden Club, who maintains the Azalea Walk, spearheaded the project to repair asphalt along the walkway’s entrance broken by wear and tree roots.
“One of the best collections of azaleas is right here in the 64-acre bird sanctuary in midtown Augusta,” said Mayor Garnett Johnson, praising the club for its commitment to the park. “The transformation is clear… it has increased safety by avoiding the street, it has increased accessibility for chair users [and] it’s more visually beautiful.”
Club member Karen Brittingham was the Azalea Walk entrance project manager. Her family provided the seed money for the restoration, raised through donations in memory of their mother, Kathleen Lawrence Brittingham, who died in 2021.
“This has been a three-year project,” said Brittingham, whose family also contributed the bricks used to build the column at the Azalea Walk entrance. “It looks so much better, now.”
Leading up to the ribbon-cutting for the restored Azalea Walk, the audience enjoyed jazz performances by the Rob Foster Duo, a rendition of “God Bless America” by soloist Gwen Rouse, and an art display of nature-themed paintings by artists Patricia Tante, Vicki Greene and former Azalea Garden Club president Joan Vanover.
“We did this because we knew there weren’t going to be any flowers in bloom on the trail,” said Vanover about the display. “It was just an idea to add some color to the garden, since we had such beautiful color two weeks ago.”
The sun came out just in time, shortly after the ribbon cutting, to make way for guests to stroll the Azalea Walk, next to the Bark Park and leading into the Camellia Gardens.
Besides repaving the walkway, the garden club also used a grant from the National Garden Clubs of America toward planting more than 100 azalea plants native to the area to attract pollinators.
The Azalea Garden Club received plenty of assistance of the past three years in restoring the garden, including a collaborative effort between Boys With a Future, an after school program for boys in the Harrisburg area, directed by Russell Joel Brown of the “From Mozart to Motown” stage show; and the youth ministry of Church of the Good Shepherd.
The Azalea Walk itself is surrounded by cultivated flora that one can easily get lost in, drifting to into any of the other garden areas—the Sunken Blue, Hydrangea and Memorial Tree Gardens, for example—on through the several Pendleton King Park amenities, such as the playgrounds or the pickle ball court; or natural attractions such as the wetlands or Lake Elizabeth.
Brittingham cited the Richmond County Engineering Department’s traffic study three years ago that demonstrated that over 15,000 vehicles visited the park each month on average. Azalea Club President Beverly Dorn notes this as one indication of the importance of the park to Augusta’s citizens.
“If you spend any time there, especially on the weekends, the disc golfers are out, families are celebrating birthdays and graduations and other special events and young families of bringing their children to see the waterfowl,” said Dorn. “Everybody is there to have fun. It’s just such a happy place, and such a jewel for our community.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
