New and improved Texas Discovery Gardens at Fair Park in Dallas reopens

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Often in old English manors, great greenhouses and conservatories span one wing of a house. Private Edens, these gardens confine nature to the realm of the human while giving it a space to flourish and amaze. An arboreal, fecund, sometimes secretive ambit, the conservatory intimately links us to the earth even as it precludes us from experiencing unbridled nature. To enter into such a space, atmospheric and sculpted, is at the same time to be overtaken by the power of nature’s craft and to see through the eye of the designer.

Such was my experience at the Texas Discovery Gardens, due to reopen after extensive renovations on 12 September, the same day DART’s Green Line opens up to Fair Park. At the heart of the Gardens now sits the Butterfly House. Begun with a $3 million gift from Mary Anne Cree in memory of her mother, the House was helped along by the City of Dallas, which gave an additional $4.7 million. Thanks to these donations, tropical butterflies from southern Texas and Central America will flit about sipping on nectar in a truly beautiful environment.

Outside the conservatory, the formal gardens are interspersed with fountains and ponds, arbors, gardens for native plants, butterflies, roses, and more, and with sculptures. Small enough in scale not to overwhelm, the gardens allow you to meander about without exhausting yourself in the heat or missing something. They are restful, inviting, and at times, majestic. For these aesthetic reasons, the gardens are often the site of weddings. But they also serve a pedagogical purpose. A class on organic gardening, part of the EarthKeepers Education Program, will be in session this year, and a series of lectures with Austin College scientists on organic-based growing will also take place. The TDG’s Second Annual Fashion Show, exhibiting work by organic, green designers, will occur this spring.

Inside the newly designed TDG, a gift shop, a classroom/lab space, and an encaustic art exhibit, will be available to visitors. The building, which dates from 1936, has had to be carefully refitted in order to keep in code with its historic designation. The new design by Oglesby Greene has been overseen by Phoenix I Restoration and Construction — and the space is open, naturally lit, and cleanly streamlined.

But it is the Butterfly House, with its old conservatory skylight windows, remnant of another era, which pulls Texas Discovery Gardens together. Aflutter with its various butterflies, its little fountains with water bugs, its autograph tree, pentas, ferns, and palms, and its small display case where you can see pupae break into butterflies, the House is a world unto itself — a cloister for the butterflies as much as an enclave for novice lepidopterists.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov was an avid butterfly-lover, and butterflies spirit through the pages of Pale Fire. In one instance in the novel, a butterfly “took off, and we saw it next moment sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banisters on his birthday.” It is a joyful metaphor — full of Ariel’s mischief. With Dallas’ own butterfly house, perhaps new Nabokovs will be in the making.