Fort Worth Botanic Garden | Fort Worth, Texas

The Fort Worth Botanic Garden (FWBG) was truly “deep in the heart” of the SGHS April 2006 annual meeting. As such, its impressive lecture hall welcomed members several times for introductory presentations and the yearly business meeting, while also serving as the departure point to explore the Botanic Garden in all of its dimensions.

Tutored in advance by former FWBG education director Steven Chamblee, SGHS members toured a site that exceeds one-hundred acres west of the city. Its story began with a 1912 land purchase which three decades later would become Rock Springs Park. Those early decades were a time when Fort Worth still carried strong memories of frontier times, being an army post before becoming the seat of Tarrant County. The town soon became a bustling hub of the cattle trade, first as a stopover for cattle drives and then as a rail center complete with its famed stockyards and, later, meat packing plants. The oil industry was to follow in the early twentieth-century, helping to build Fort Worth into a city needing parks for an expanding population. 

City forester Raymond Morrison played an early key role for FWBG. Beginning in 1929, he led the way in recrafting the original rock-strewn purchase area into Rock Springs Park, which was marked by waterfalls, pools, and thick woodlands. Just four years later Morrison would also head up the construction of the rose garden and vista. Designed by the well-regarded Kansas City landscape architecture firm Hare & Hare, it was built with labor funded by the Federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation and is probably the space for which FGBG is most famed. The geometrically formal terraced area (with a nod to Versailles) opened in 1934 and became the spot around which the park would expand. (This is encompassed within the thirty-three-acre nucleus of the larger park, which gained National Register of Historic Places status in 2009.)

Since the Society’s visit, the Rose Gardens have gone through extensive restoration prior to reopening in 2017.  As fully detailed on the Botanic Garden’s website, the overall design features the Shelter House at the top elevation, with the long Rose Ramp, Lower Rose Garden, a fountain, and a pond to the east. North of the Lower Rose Garden visitors find the Republic of Texas Garden and Oval Rose Garden. In total the Rose Gardens encompass a massive number of their namesake plants. Given the connection Texas has established with old garden roses, however, the large array of antique types was perhaps of greatest interest to SGHS members. 

Moving out from the Shelter House, visitors can opt to explore a variety of themed areas in typical botanical garden fashion. To the north, for example, one can pass through the live-oak-lined Horseshoe Garden to find a unique Trial Garden. Octagonal in form, and appearing much like spider’s web from above, staff and volunteers use it to experiment with various perennials and roses. 

Sited east of the Trial Garden, the seven-and-a-half-acre Japanese Garden welcomed SGHS members during an optional tour in 2006. It joins the Rose Gardens in numbering among FWBG’s most popular areas. Designing and installing a successful Japanese Garden is surely not for the faint hearted, but this successful example has gained praise from both daily visitors and dedicated students of the style. Although various designers are linked to individual components of the garden, credit for the early 1970s master plan goes to Shanghai-born and Tokyo-trained Kingsley K. Wu, then an art instructor at Texas Women’s University.* From Japanese-styled structures to serenity-inducing koi-filled pools and raked sand beds, this garden succeeds in a way that brings its devotees to blog: “The Japanese Garden at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden is worth a return visit, in my opinion, every season of the year.”** SGHS visitors in 2006 echoed the same appreciation for FWBG as a whole.

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For much more on the Botanic Garden, visit: https://fwbg.org/. The interactive gardens map is highly recommended: https://fwbg.gardenexplorer.org/

*Kingsley Wu (d. Feb. 2004) retired as Purdue University professor emeritus in visual and performing arts.  He seems to have viewed the FWBG as one of his finest achievements.

**Quote from: https://najga.org/fort-worth-japanese-garden/