BOTANICAL VS NATURAL

1975: During a Designer Showhouse preview party in the DeGolyer Estate, co-chair and future arboretum president Mary Brinegar stations herself in the library and shows partygoers the hidden doors.

1976: The City of Dallas purchases the DeGolyer estate from SMU for $1.076 million with bond money approved in 1975.

1977: The Park Board approves “development of a $200,000 arboretum and botanical garden” at the city-owned DeGolyer estate, based on the recommendation of a 12-member committee that includes Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society president Ralph Pinkus.

1978: The DeGolyer house and gardens are listed on the National Historic Register.

1980: The society purchases the 22-acre Camp estate, the DeGolyers’ neighbor to the northeast, for $550,000 with money loaned from society chairman Ralph Rogers.

1982: The city and society sign a contract allowing the development of the arboretum on the combined DeGolyer and Camp estates.

1984: Jones & Jones of Seattle complete their master plan for the arboretum, including a sculpted-hedge maze, a sixstory conservatory, a festival marketplace, privately owned restaurants, an auditorium, an outdoor amphitheater, dormitories for research students and an observation tower with views of the grounds and the downtown skyline. The Park Board approves the $50 million plan with no public hearings, and the society agrees to come up with $20 million if the city comes up with the rest.

1985: Billionaire Ross Perot pledges $8 million to the Dallas Arboretum, $2 million up front and $2 million each consecutive year as the arboretum meets certain demands, such as planting thousands of flowering and foliage trees along the White Rock Lake shoreline and giving the Perot family naming rights to the arboretum.

The society hosts the inaugural Dallas Blooms festival, with 130,000 tulips enticing 40,000 people to visit

Berger to create their four-and-a-half-acre formal gardens, and the property included a magnolia allée, a wisteria arbor, a rose garden and more than 200 species of plants. Even their home’s name, “Rancho Encinal,” paid homage in Spanish to the live oak trees on the land.

“I think they would both be very pleased with how the house and grounds are used because they loved gardening,” the docent says.

The home, which looks today much as it did when the DeGolyers lived in it, reflects their love of travel, books and art. The DeGolyers not only were collectors but also benefactors, with Rancho Encinal often playing host to galas and cocktail parties benefitting the Dallas arts organizations.

A marker notes the home was listed on the Na- tional Historic Register in 1978 — a rarity in Dallas. Fewer than 30 homes have this honor, and less than 20 are protected by the City of Dallas’ landmark designation status, as the DeGolyer house is.

“It’s good that someone had the foresight,” the docent says, “otherwise this would probably be condos or apartments.”

ONE ‘PLANT MAN’S’ DOGGED VISION

Before Nell DeGolyer died, both the City of Dallas and SMU jockeyed for the estate, according to Sid Stahl, a past president of the Dallas Park Board. The DeGolyers “had strong feelings” toward both the university and the city, and they figured out that SMU, if given the land, would likely sell be- cause it wanted the cash, he says.

“They cut a deal,” Stahl says, that the property would be left to SMU, which would in turn sell it to the city.

“That way, SMU would end up with the money, and the City of Dallas would end up with the property,” Stahl says.

When the city had the land appraised, the report showed its value to be $2 million and suggested that the “highest and best use” for the house was to remain a threeacre estate mansion, and the “highest, best and most profitable” use of the remaining acreage would be a “subdivision development of luxury homesites.”

Instead, as the DeGolyers intended, the land was sold to the City of Dallas for $1.076 million.

A couple of mentions about a Dallas arboretum appear in news stories from the ’20s and ’40s, including a Dallas Arboretum Foundation chaired by none other than Everette DeGolyer. The facility itself didn’t materialize, however, until Ralph Pinkus arrived on the scene. He had spent several years leading the New York Botanic Garden and found it troubling that Dallas was the largest U.S. city with no special area for displaying trees and shrubs.

Pinkus, who founded North Haven Gardens, began recruiting support for an arboretum and botanic garden soon after he moved here in 1951, and he later was named the first president of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society.

Neil Sperry became a Dallas County horticulturist in 1970 and worked with Pinkus on the society board in its early days. Sperry, widely known as a local gardening guru, describes Pinkus as “the best plant man I have known in the state of Texas.”

“There are people who can give the lyrics of every 1950s song, and then there are people who know every plant they have ever come across, and Ralph Pinkus was one of those,” Sperry says.

Plant collecting and trialing was Pinkus’s passion, which is why he so desperately wanted to see an arboretum in Dallas. As reported in a 1974 Dallas Morning News article, Pinkus speaks before the Park Board and tells board members that with so many people moving to Dallas, it’s “vital that the city expand its outlook.”

Then he twists the knife a bit: “We don’t even have a botanical garden on the scale of the one in Fort Worth.”

Part of Pinkus’s challenge was educating Dallas residents, including the Park Board, about what an arboretum is and why the city needed one. He described it as “a teaching tool,” a collection of all sorts of plants that would be labeled so people could see how they fare in this particular climate any day of the year.

“Our conditions are different from each other part of the country, yet we have no testing ground currently,” Pinkus said in a 1976 Dallas Morning News article.

The society looked at various sites — the old Moss Farm estate in present-day Lake Highlands, Samuell Park along East Grand,