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At an elevation of 4,500 feet at the top of Toxaway Mountain in North Carolina lies a picturesque nature preserve with a panoramic view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Southern Highlands Reserve, a private foundation founded in 2002, is home to a 20-acre display garden surrounded by 100 acres of natural woodland, as well as a native plant arboretum and research center that attracts botanists, horticulturists and biologists from around the world. The Reserve is dedicated to sustaining the natural ecosystems of the Blue Ridge Mountains through the preservation, cultivation and display of plants native to the region and advocating for their value through education, restoration and research.
Southern Highlands Reserve is a founding partner of the Southern Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative, a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which aims to restore the red spruce population that supports many forms of wildlife, including the Carolina northern flying squirrel and the world’s smallest tarantula. The Southern Appalachian red spruce-Fraser fir population has been reduced due to logging, climate change and invasive species and is now the second-most endangered ecosystem in North America. To date, the reserve has grown 7,000 one-, two- and three-gallon red spruce trees that have been planted on federal lands in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia with a 95% survival rate.
“It's our desire to share best practices about how visitors can take ideas back to their landscapes on how you deal with water mitigation and with climate change and how native plants can enhance a landscape in a design setting but also provide a really important function ecologically,” says Washington and Lee University trustee emeritus Robert Balentine ’79, cofounder of the Reserve with his wife, Betty.
For their preservation work, the Balentines, lifelong gardening and nature enthusiasts, were awarded the 2025 Garden Club of America’s Cynthia Pratt Laughlin Medal, which is given annually to just 10 recipients nationwide for outstanding achievement in environmental protection and the maintenance of the quality of life. The honor is particularly meaningful to the couple, as they represent three generations of the Peachtree Garden Club in Atlanta: Robert Balentine’s mother was a past president and horticulture judge, Betty Balentine is a past president, and their daughter, Emily Balentine Barbour ’07, is a current member.
“We are so honored to receive this award, which is particularly meaningful because of our family’s longtime association with the Garden Club of America,” Balentine says. “Southern Highlands Reserve has been a labor of love for us for more than two decades, and it’s nice that other people have seen the impact of what we’ve been able to do and recognize that.”
Balentine’s love of gardening was forged during his childhood. His father was a rosarian and his mother was a gardener; as a child, he helped out in the family’s rose and vegetable gardens. He carried a love of the outdoors to Washington and Lee University and cites the natural beauty surrounding campus as a wonderful bonus.
“I think the W&L campus is magical; it’s one of the most beautiful college campuses in America,” he says. He and his wife, a Mary Baldwin University graduate, who just celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary in December 2024, would enjoy dates hiking Goshen Pass and exploring the local outdoors. “One of the reasons I fell in love with Lexington is because it’s right there in the mountains.”
After graduating with a degree in French, Balentine began his career with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, where at the age of 28 he was elected the youngest vice president in Merrill Lynch history. In 1987, he and his father, Bob, co-founded Balentine & Co., which grew to become the largest privately held investment counseling firm in the Southeast. In 2002, the firm was acquired by Wilmington Trust Co., where Balentine became chair and CEO of Wilmington Trust Investment Management. Since 2009, he has served as chairman of Balentine LLC, an independent wealth management firm headquartered in Atlanta.
“I think the wealth management industry is so rewarding because when you are tasked with looking after a family's generational wealth, you can have a material impact on that family, helping them shape their legacy and their philanthropy,” Balentine says. “The money line runs close to the heart line, and when you sit at the apex of how a family invests, how they spend, how they use the resources with which they're blessed to help others or help their community, you really get a sense of who they are.”
Balentine has an October birthday, and every year when his children were little, his wife would surprise him with a weekend getaway to celebrate. One year, the family visited Greystone Inn at Lake Toxaway in North Carolina. Balentine was an Eagle Scout and had spent a lot of time in the mountains of North Georgia and Western North Carolina and Virginia.
“I developed a love of the southern Appalachian Mountains, particularly the flora, because it is among the most botanically diverse regions in the world,” he says. “In one acre at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park there are more different types of trees than in all of Northern Europe.”
The Balentines felt an immediate kinship with the area and came back a few months later to start looking for property to build a vacation home. They purchased an initial piece of land in the 1990s and over the years bought additional adjacent properties and put them under a conservation easement to protect the land from development.
“It’s a beautiful piece of property that literally sits on the Eastern Continental Divide with a 70-mile view into Upstate South Carolina and Georgia,” Balentine says. “We wanted to build a home there because we wanted our children to experience the joy of nature that Betty and I did growing up.”
The Balentines spend many weekends and several weeks a year at the Reserve, helping with everything from pruning and weeding to cutting the meadow with a tractor. Southern Highlands has a staff of five naturalists and horticulturalists, including an executive director, and welcomes more than 1,000 visitors a year (the Reserve is open to the public on a limited basis through reservations). All the plants in the 20-acre garden, including rare pink shell azaleas and hundreds of hybrid azaleas, have been accessioned and are logged in a digital plant database. Each plant’s origin, whether they were grown from a seed in the onsite greenhouse or acquired from a nursery, is recorded, as is the pH of the soil and the growing condition for the plants.
“I think of gardening as the slowest of the performing arts, and you have the ability to evoke an emotional response to landscape through a plant palette: the selection, the color, the form, the texture, all the things that go into making a garden what it is,” Balentine says. “And particularly in a busy, conflicted world, people are seeking solace in nature and places where they can feel grounded. My hope is that when visitors come to Southern Highlands Reserve, they take away that genius loci, that sense of place, that you can create these magical experiences in the landscape through thoughtful design and plant selection – and you can do it in an ecologically sustainable way that also teaches best practices.”
In addition to the Garden Club of America award, the Balentines received the Preservation Hero Award from the Library of American Landscape History in 2017. Balentine also serves as chair of The Garden Conservancy and has served as chair of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, vice chair of the Woodruff Arts Center and president of the Rotary Club of Atlanta during its centennial year for which he received the Sheffield Leadership Award. In 2013, he was the inaugural recipient of the Metro Atlanta Chamber's Business Person of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award and was named one of Atlanta's Most Admired CEO’s by the Atlanta Business Chronicle in 2018. Betty Balentine is past president of the Peachtree Garden Club and the Atlanta Ceramic Circle. She served on the board of directors for the University of Georgia Press and chair of the board of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.
A deeply engaged W&L alumnus, Balentine served as president of the Atlanta Chapter of the Alumni Association and later as a member of the Alumni Board. He was a member of the Board of Trustees from 2006 until 2015 and has served on his class reunion committees and the Honor Our Past, Build Our Future campaign cabinet.
The Balentines have contributed to a number of Washington and Lee's priorities, including leadership support for the Annual Fund, the Shepherd Program and Hillel House. In 2009, they established the Robert M. and Elizabeth G. Balentine Scholarship Endowment to benefit outstanding students at W&L. They were named to the Benefactors Wall in 2022.
“I've always believed it's a responsibility and a joy to give back to our communities,” Balentine says. “What I value most about W&L is the Honor System. In business, what most people focus on is, ‘Do I trust this person?’ And I think one of the reasons our alumni network is so strong is because it’s a community built on trust, and it has fostered so many connections. Washington and Lee is a remarkable place, and it's remarkable because of the students, faculty and alumni who have this sense of shared community and trust built around the values that have served us for almost 300 years.”