Dallas Arboretum: Oil Money, Live Oaks, and White Rock Lake

The sixty-six acres of garden stretched along the eastern shore of White Rock Lake represent something unusual in a city famous for razing its past to build its future: a place where the landscape actually accumulated history rather than erasing it.

The land at the heart of the Dallas Arboretum was once a dairy farm called Rancho Encinal, named for its stands of live oaks , encinal being Spanish for oak grove. In the late nineteen thirties, Everette Lee DeGolyer and his wife Nell purchased the property and built a graceful Spanish Colonial Revival house designed by the architects Denman Scott and Burton Schutt. DeGolyer was one of the most consequential geologists in American history, the man credited with discovering the enormous oil fields of Mexico and the Middle East for private industry. He was also a bibliophile, a patron of the arts, and a serious gardener. The DeGolyers commissioned landscape architects Arthur and Marie Berger to design the grounds around the house.

Nell DeGolyer died in nineteen seventy-two, and the couple's children donated the estate to Southern Methodist University. The City of Dallas purchased the forty-four-acre property in nineteen seventy-seven and placed it under the management of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society. Three years later, the city added a neighboring twenty-two-acre estate, known as the Camp property, giving the arboretum its current footprint.

The gardens opened to the public in nineteen eighty-four, and DeGolyer's Spanish Colonial house remains the architectural centerpiece of the property. The gardens now encompass more than nineteen distinct areas, including the Palmer Fern Dell, the Rory Meyers Children's Adventure Garden, and formal gardens with tiered fountains and reflecting pools.

The arboretum has become one of Dallas's signature seasonal destinations, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to its spring tulip festival and fall pumpkin display. The DeGolyer house offers historical tours that connect the spectacle of blooms to the story of the oilman who first planted trees along this lake shore.

The live oaks that gave the property its name are still here, some of them old enough to have shaded the original dairy farm. White Rock shimmers beyond them. It is a rare Dallas experience: standing still long enough to feel layers of time.