Audubon Volunteer Honored
City of Boise honors late civic leader's legacy by renaming pollinator garden
ROYCE MCCANDLESS rmccandless@idahopress.com
September 30, 2025
BOISE — Boise city and environmental leaders gathered Monday to formally change the name of the Warm Springs Pollinator Garden to the Mary Grunewald McGown Pollinator Garden, recognizing a life dedicated to advancing environmental causes in the city and the state.
McGown died at the age of 70 in 2020, but was able to see the establishment of the Warm Springs Pollinator Garden, which came about in 2018 through a partnership between the city of Boise and the Golden Eagle Audubon Society — of which McGown was a member — in an effort to revitalize an area adjacent to the Boise River Greenbelt. Now the garden where she volunteered prior to her death will bear her name, permanently recognizing the contributions she made to the city, state and beyond in the area of conservation.
In a sign of how wide-reaching McGown’s impact was from serving on organizations and agencies that varied from the Boise Parks and Recreation Commission to the Idaho League of Women Voters, several dozen including Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, Boise Parks and Recreation Director Doug Holloway and members of several local environmental groups were in attendance along with the McGown family at Warm Springs Park, located at 250 S. Marden Lane.
McLean said she came to know McGown during the time that they served on the city’s parks board together, remarking that her nature would make you unaware of her impact on the city unless you were in deep conversation about a desired change for the city. Only then, McLean said, would her learnings and experience become known.
“Her legacy would come through that conversation, and I remember her talking about gardens and pollinators and all of those things on the parks board,” McLean said. “So when I received the request to name this area for Mary, it was without hesitation … it’s so reflective of who she was, what she cared about.”
John and Mary Grunewald McGown Photo courtesy McGown family
The foremost advocate of the name change was Mary’s husband, John McGown, who married Mary the same year she graduated from the University of Northern Colorado, in 1978, and the couple moved from Denver to Boise a few years later.
While in Idaho, Mary received a Ph.D. in Forest, Wildlife and Range Management from the University of Idaho and dedicated her academic knowledge to a number of organizations in the years that followed, including landscape architecture firm Beck & Baird, the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation, the city of Boise, Idaho Rivers United and the Idaho Department of Water Resources.
Her civic pursuits were similarly varied. She was a member of the League of Women Voters and was president of the Boise chapter, she was an Idaho representative of the Northwest Energy Coalition and chair for the Idaho Rivers United Board of Directors. For the city of Boise, she was previously a member of the Boise Parks and Recreation Commission, serving as a commissioner from 2002 to 2012 including a stint as president from 2003 to 2004.
Family and Former Colleagues Praise Her Dedication
Holloway said that as of today, she continues to be the commission’s longest-serving member.
Her work as an advocate for the state’s natural resources extended further to the aforementioned Golden Eagle Audubon Society, Idaho Conservation League, Sierra Club, Idaho Master Naturalist Program and the Idaho Native Plant Society.
John McGown and others remarked Monday that despite the breadth of her volunteer work, she remained an unassuming figure. John recalled that, while she served on the board of directors of Idaho Rivers United, they attended the annual meeting at the Riverside Hotel. While he knew she was on the board, he didn’t know why they were placed at the head of the table.
“She says, ‘well, I am chairman of the board,’” John said. “It just illustrates that she was very unassuming.”
As her professional pursuits would indicate, much of Mary’s personal time was spent enjoying the outdoors. She was an avid hiker and traveler and completed walks in Great Britain with the Newport Outdoor Group and was “one of a few to walk the whole length of Wales.” Her most recent international excursion was to South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, where she was joined by John and her daughters Erin and Brenna, her obituary said.
Erin said that for her mother, one of her favorite aspects of travel was the enjoyment that she got from meeting new people.
“You learn so much when you actually spend time in somebody else’s environment, and she really enjoyed that aspect of travel,” she said.
While in Idaho, Mary and her family spent a significant amount of time at their cabin in Grandjean, where she was able to enjoy her passion for birdwatching and similarly leave a mark on the community by founding the Wapiti Creek Summer Homes Firewise Committee in 2018. This effort led the community to be recognized as a USA Firewise Community, one of only 33 communities in Idaho accredited for their work to proactively reduce wildfire risk through education, planning and investment in fire safety.
“She was just so dynamic,” Gail Robb, lead of the Wapiti Creek Summer Homes Firewise Committee, said. “That Firewise Committee, it not only affected that community, but a lot of cabin owners also applied it to their homes — her reach was a lot greater than just our little community.”
Despite these myriad advancements made in her Boise community and beyond, leaders in the city and members of her family maintained that Mary McGown never lost her sense of humility. The pollinator garden, Brenna said, served as a means of centering her in a way that she had never put herself previously.
“This is a way for us to put her at the front and center and put her values at the front and center and really honor her legacy,” Erin said. “There’s so many people here today, and … I think that shows the wide reach and impacts that she had.”
For Erin, the values Mary was able to instill in her, of cooperation and giving back, led her to pursue a career in public service, an impact that was echoed by Brenna, who now advances the same aims of her mother.
“There is some family lore that while she was pregnant with me, she was flying around in small bush planes in Alaska, doing conservation work,” Brenna said. “And that must have stuck with me, because that is what I do for work — now I fly around in small bush planes doing conservation work in Alaska.”
Brenna noted, however, that she and her mother didn’t get the opportunity to share her similar experiences and lamented that her mother didn’t have the opportunity to see herself publicly recognized, to see her accomplishments celebrated.
“My message to you in the future is to hold your loved ones close, celebrate their wins, champion them, recognize them and tell them that you love them,” Brenna said. “I’m so happy to have this place where she can be recognized and we can come to reflect, and I hope that through this garden, she can continue to inspire us.”
John McGown, Erin McGown, Brenna McGown, Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, Boise Parks and Recreation Director Doug Holloway and Boise City Council President Pro Tem Meredith Stead. Photo: Ann de Bolt
Golden Eagle Audubon members Patti Guicheteau, Jo Anne Lafferty, Jill Jasper and Mary McGown in 2018.