Volunteers play a critical role in helping us achieve our mission at Southern Highlands Reserve, and our program has grown significantly in scope and numbers since its launch in 2019. Last year, volunteers completed more than 500 hours potting up plants in our nursery, leading tours, pruning, weeding, and planting. Every year, our Volunteer of the Year Award honors an outstanding volunteer for valuable and selfless dedication, enhancing efficiency within the organization, and spreading awareness throughout the community. We are delighted to recognize Beth Nathan as our 2025 Volunteer of the Year.
Since joining our team in 2019, Beth has been one of our most devoted and consistent volunteers. Her attention to detail, work ethic, dependability, and thoughtfulness are such gifts, and we are so grateful for her time and dedication. A co-founder of the Oconee Bell Chapter of the North Carolina Plant Society, Beth has also served as a rescue facilitator and plant sale volunteer with the Georgia Native Plant Society; a coordinator for the Friends of Mary Scott Nature Park; and a volunteer gardener under George Sanko, former botany professor and CEO of the Georgia Perimeter College Native Plant Botanical Garden.
Beth grew up across from a farmer’s field on the outskirts of a Michigan city. “My family, with a heritage in farming, maintained a half-acre veggie garden and some fruit trees. My mother maintained a yard full of landscape plants and grew tropical orchids as a hobby,” she said. “Plants were always in my blood.”
Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. At a time when integrated circuits were still somewhat new, she took a job in a central nervous system lab within a pharmaceutical company and started using simple electronic equipment to control experiments. She became interested in logic and programming and earned an associate of science degree in electronics after a move to Ohio.
During a long, cold Ohio winter, her husband, Bob, received a job offer in Atlanta, and the opportunity to live in a gentler climate was too appealing to pass up. In Atlanta, Beth used her new skills at an electronics company, then at Yerkes Primate Center. She studied computer programming and programmed for two companies before shifting to consulting. In Atlanta, she also discovered a deep love for botany.
“After we moved to a house with a big hillside backyard with a lot of plants I didn’t recognize, I started going to meetings of the Georgia Native Plant Society,” she said. She volunteered at a native plant garden in southeast Atlanta and took field trips to Smoky Mountains National Park and the annual Cullowhee Native Plant Conference at Western Carolina University — which is how she came to know western North Carolina and discovered Southern Highlands Reserve. Beth and Bob and their dog, Vivi, now split time between Sapphire and Atlanta.
Connecting with other people who prioritize the preservation of nature and learning about plants are two of Beth’s greatest joys in volunteering at SHR. “I always like the feeling that I’m contributing, the feeling I’m doing something that will in some way help preserve the natural ecosystem that has existed there for a long time,” she said. “There’s sort of a spiritual feeling about being there. That itself is very rewarding. It calms me and makes me feel anchored again.”
If you are interested in joining our volunteer team, please complete our online application.