Few places in town offer the botanical delights of the Greensboro Arboretum. It’s where Matthew Hicks started his journey with the City of Greensboro 16 years ago, and it’s where he finds himself enjoying another stroll around the grounds.

Filled with different plant collections and distinct structural features, the pristine 17-acre garden holds a special place in Hicks’ heart. Asking him to pick a favorite spot is, in his own words, “like picking your favorite child.”

“If I had to choose, the small tree collection has always been one I enjoyed,” said Hicks, the City’s botanical gardens and cemeteries superintendent. “It was a spot that didn’t require constant maintenance – trees only do so much at a time, so it’s more of a gradual process.

“It tended to be a spot that might get overlooked, so that was my time to get out of the office and do something. I’d go grab my handsaw and go in there and do some small pruning and change some structure things.”

The vegetation surrounding Hicks on this humid August morning is not all that has grown under his tutelage with the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department.

As overseer of the daily operations and big-picture projects of the City’s four public gardens, four public cemeteries, and the recently completed Downtown Greenway, Hicks discovered a community of individuals and groups equally as invested in the City’s green space as him. Thanks to those connections, Hicks and his team can better provide care needed to help the area blossom.

“So much of my job now is relationships,” Hicks said. “Being able to have that impact to tell the stories of our sites and show how we are actually able to engage with our community on a daily basis is important.”

While these days Hicks plays more of an administrative role, he still loves getting his hands dirty and working outdoors in the elements as he did growing up in rural northeast Guilford County. Hicks spent his free time exploring the woods, fishing, and enjoying nature.

“I had an early appreciation for raising a garden and for the outdoors, Hicks said. “I grew up valuing hard work. That was the culture I grew up in, so when it came time to graduate high school and figure out where I was going, I knew, – ironically – I didn’t want to sit at a desk.”

After graduating from NC State University in 2005, Hicks worked as a wholesale manager at a plant nursery where he flexed his plant knowledge and learned customer relations. The experience prepared him to take over as the Arboretum’s supervisor in 2009.

“I was constantly talking to people about plants, and it was usually about aligning what they wanted with a plant that fits, and I carried that over when I came here,” Hicks said. “I’ve been asked so many times at the nursery, ‘I see it in this pot here, but I have no clue what it will look when it matures.’ So I decided to focus on what nurseries were carrying, then plant them, let them grow, and create this as a place where people can come and see what it will look like down the road.”

With help from his hard-working Arboretum crew and local nonprofit Greensboro Beautiful, Hicks spent the next 11 years developing the garden into what it is today. He was promoted in 2020 to oversee all of the City’s botanical gardens, and the Downtown Greenway came under his purview shortly thereafter.

The four-mile greenway, a 25-year endeavor led by a public-private partnership between the City and Action Greensboro, was completed last May and represents one of the biggest highlights of Hicks’ tenure.

“When we talk about the Downtown Greenway, one of the things we talk about is the fact that it touches eight different neighborhoods in all four corners of Greensboro” Hicks said. “Just being able to see the impact in each of those quadrants means a lot. You get to see the true picture of what Greensboro is. As you ride or walk around the greenway you can reflect on the history of each of those areas.”

Hicks also sees history in the City’s four public cemeteries, Forest Lawn, Green Hill, Maplewood, and Union. In addition to maintaining the spaces and facilitating hundreds of interments annually, he says working alongside communities and mending old scars from the past has been very rewarding.

“We’ve been working closely with some of the community around Maplewood Cemetery, which is a historically African-American cemetery created because of the restrictions of Green Hill at the time,” Hicks said. “That cemetery has been viewed as being neglected by that community, so we’ve been working through building those relationships to let them know this place is just as relevant as anywhere else.”

“We want to help, and we want to rightly engage with this cemetery.”

The logistics of overseeing such a broad swath of Greensboro’s green space are immense and more work than one determined individual can handle. Hicks generates community engagement and builds relationships with those committed to maintaining and preserving the City’s much-loved outdoor spaces.

“As I think about my 16 years, the biggest [change] is the way it has transitioned from plants to people,” Hicks said with a laugh. “I’ve seen the benefit from that personally from the relationships I have now. I can look to those people as partners or advocates, and I can see how our relationships with the private sector and nonprofits come together with the City to get things done.”