The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden is a 66 acre public garden beside White Rock Lake in Dallas.¹ Its land was once two private estates, the DeGolyer and Camp properties, which a nonprofit society and the city combined in the years from 1977 to 1982; visitors were first admitted in 1984.¹ The Handbook of Texas groups it with the Dallas Zoo as a city facility whose operation is contracted to a nonprofit.²

Rancho Encinal

The larger of the two estates was the home of the geologist Everette Lee DeGolyer and the civic leader Nell Goodrich DeGolyer. His geophysical company perfected the reflection seismograph, which became the main instrument of geophysical oil exploration, and the Handbook describes him as the father of American geophysics.³ The couple settled in Dallas in the 1930s; his Handbook entry places the move in 1932 and hers in 1936.³⁴

When they acquired it, the property was a dairy farm of 44 acres, named Rancho Encinal after the many live oaks on it.¹ Burton Schutt and Denman Scott drew the plans for the house in 1939. The garden describes it as Latin Colonial Revival; the Handbook’s term is Spanish Colonial Revival, with 1940 given as the year it was finished.¹⁴ It covers 21,000 square feet with thirteen rooms, seven baths, five fireplaces, seven chimneys and a library of 1,750 square feet, and it had central heating and air conditioning from the start.¹ Nell DeGolyer occupied the house for the rest of her life, dying in 1972, and her will left it to Southern Methodist University; some years later the city of Dallas acquired it.⁴ The house is on both the National Register of Historic Places and the Texas Register, and a renovation has returned it to its look of the 1940s.¹ The couple also provided for the DeGolyer Foundation, which led to the DeGolyer Library at the university.⁴

The Camp house

On a hill sloping down toward the lake stands the Alex Camp House, an 8,500 square foot residence that the architect John Staub designed and built, finished in 1938.¹ Its plan is a single room in depth, which gives every living room and bedroom three exposures, and its styling draws on Latin Colonial, English Regency and Art Deco sources.¹

Becoming a public garden

The Dallas Arboretum & Botanical Society, Inc., known as DABS, took shape as an incorporated nonprofit in 1974, with bylaws and elected officers.¹ Three years later the city’s park board proposed that the botanical garden go on the DeGolyer grounds, then city property after a purchase from the university, and left the society to find the money for its first costs.¹ Membership and public backing grew during 1978 and 1979, and within about six years of incorporation the society had collected over $1 million and bought the neighboring Camp land of 22 acres.¹ A 1982 agreement between Dallas and the society established the arboretum on the joined 66 acres. Two years later the gardens received their first public visitors.¹ The sequence is examined, source by source, in How a Garden Became a Civic Institution.

Operation

Members, donors and the Dallas Park and Recreation Department support the garden, which reports a board of 75 directors, more than 220 paid staff and over 400 active volunteers.¹ Horticultural research is carried on in its Trial Gardens, and it offers educational programs and annual events; its management calls it one of the country’s newer major botanical gardens and has master planning under way for 2027.¹

A similar division of roles between the city and a private body applies at Fair Park, where Dallas owns the grounds and shares their management with the fair’s own association, and at the Hall of State there, a city building managed by the organization in the Dallas Historical Society entry.⁵⁶ Rosser Newton was among the founding members of the Dallas Arboretum Foundation, as the civic page records.⁷

References

Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden, About the Dallas Arboretum ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Dallas, TX ↩
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, DeGolyer, Everette Lee ↩ ↩²
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, DeGolyer, Nell Virginia Goodrich ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Fair Park ↩
Dallas Historical Society, The Hall of State ↩
Rosser Newton, Texas history ↩