NATURAL

Botanical Vs Natural

ARBORETUM HISTORY:

1938: On 22 acres of White Rock Lake’s southeast shoreline, Alex and Roberta Camp’s 8,500-square-foot home, designed by famed Texas residential architect John Staub, is completed.

1939: Everette and Nell DeGolyer take up residence in “Rancho Encinal,” a 21,000-squarefoot, 13-room Spanish Colonial Revival designed by Schutt & Scott, the architects of Hotel Bel-Air in California. The house sits on 44 acres of the lake’s southeast shoreline, adjacent to the Camp estate.

1944: Everette DeGolyer is named president of the Dallas Arboretum Foundation, whose goal is “a planting of trees, shrubs and flowers under scientific control and for the benefit of industry, commerce and public enjoyment.” The arboretum was to be incorporated into the city’s park system, part of a master plan for post World War II improvement.

1951: Ralph Pinkus opens North Haven Gardens on what was then a country lane. In those days, when Pinkus was out watering plants, he could hear the traffic on Northwest Highway — two miles away.

1956: Richard Howard, director of Harvard’s 400-acre Arnold Arboretum in Boston, travels to speak to the Dallas Garden Forum and encourages members to launch the first arboretum in Texas to try out plants. Even a single acre would be “of inestimable value to the whole city,” he says.

1962: The Dreyfus Club, one of White Rock Lake’s last private clubs, is sold to the city’s Park and Recreation Department.

1972: Nell DeGolyer dies and deeds the DeGolyers’ 44-acre estate to Southern Methodist University.

1973: Roberta Camp dies and leaves the Camps’ 22-acre estate to several charities.

1974: The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society, a joint venture of the Dallas North Garden Forum and the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce parks committee, becomes officially incorporated.

PEOPLE WHO LIVED NEAR WHITE ROCK LAKE WERE FED UP.

The arboretum was supposed to be a nature sanctuary for all of Dallas, but instead, they argued it was environmentally insensitive, discriminatory against low-income residents, and a traffic and parking nightmare.

“There is a great deal of concern from many people who don’t want a botanic amusement park at one end of the lake,” said one resident of the Peninsula Neighborhood Association.

Botanic amusement park. Mini convention center. Little Disneyland. Six Flags Over White Rock. These were among the epithets the arboretum’s neighbors hurled at the gardens.

It’s a scene that hearkens back to 2012, when neighbors took the arboretum to task over its plan to turn a portion of White Rock Lake’s Winfrey Point into an overflow parking lot. The above scenario, however, actually happened three decades ago when the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society barely had begun to take root.

History tends to repeat itself, so perhaps these parallel circumstances shouldn’t come as any surprise. But it raises the question: What is it about the Dallas Arboretum that, even after all these years, continues to provoke the ire of a vocal group of neighbors?

Today the arboretum encompasses 66 acres on the southeast shore of White Rock Lake on property valued at $21.5 million. It boasts 35,000 members, and attendance in 2014 nearly reached one million visitors.

This year, it has a $20.5 million budget for its manicured grounds and event venues. The gardens are expected to host nearly 300 weddings this year, many of them in the spring, when 500,000 tulips burst into color during the 31st annual Dallas Blooms festival. The eight-acre Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden will reopen during Blooms, and a recently opened 1,150-space parking garage directly opposite Garland Road should accommodate the visitor uptick.

Accolades continue to roll in, with the arboretum landing on nearly every list of where to visit and what not to miss in Dallas. It draws visitors not just from around the country but the world, too.

So why can’t it seem to earn the respect of so many people right in its backyard?

The Estate That Became An Arboretum

Halfway through a recent tour of the Dallas Arboretum’s DeGolyer home, a docent mentions that the estate was a bit worse for the wear when the city purchased it in 1976. After Nell DeGolyer’s death in 1972, she bequeathed the home to Southern Methodist University, which used the estate — the DeGolyers’ retirement home for 30-some-odd years — as an occasional event venue but little else. It needed hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance to return it to its former glory.

Everette DeGolyer was the epitome of a self-made man — he was born in a Kansas sod house, educated himself in geology and made millions as an oil tycoon. His fortune was amassed by the time he and Nell moved to Dallas in 1936. Their first address was a Park Cities mansion on Turtle Creek Boulevard before they purchased 44 acres on the banks of White Rock Lake and lived there from 1939 until their deaths.

The DeGolyers’ love of flora and arboreta was evident on their property. They hired Dallas landscape architect Arthur