“I’ve traveled all over the world, and there is no place to compare to the southern Appalachians,” muses Robert Balentine. And certainly no place quite like Balentine’s Southern Highlands Reserve. Assembled over the last nine years, the Reserve’s 120 acres make up a remarkable private retreat and nature preserve, native plant arboretum, and research center, a place lauded by land conservationists and studied by botanists, biologists, and horticulturists.

Cloaking the top of Toxaway Mountain outside of Cashiers, North Carolina, the retreat protects a suite of rare habitats found at an elevation of 4,500 feet. High-elevation granitic domes are home to red and chestnut oaks. Cliffs are clad with sundews, club mosses, and Appalachian shoestring fern. And the Reserve protects one of the largest known natural stands of rare pinkshell azaleas, hundreds of hybrid azaleas, and scores of native wildflowers.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Balentine, fifty-three, is the co-founder of Balentine & Company, which had grown to be the largest independently owned investment counseling firm in the Southeast when Balentine sold the firm to the Wilmington Trust in 2002. Shortly before, Balentine, and his wife, Betty, started buying property on Toxaway Mountain. “Our three children were little,” Balentine says, “and we realized they rarely saw a salamander or a turtle or had the opportunity to experience a truly wild place. We were determined to change that.”