Fort Worth Botanic Garden Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary

The FWBG Rose Garden shelter, as visitors enjoy it today. Photos courtesy of Fort Worth Botanic Garden.

This year, on Dec. 18, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden — the oldest botanic garden in Texas and now on the National Register of Historic Places — celebrates its 75th anniversary as a botanic garden.... According to early information, the land now occupied by the Fort Worth Botanic Garden featured springs that flowed into the Clear Fork of the Trinity River and supported the local Native American population. By 1868, a cotton gin owned by Major K. M. Van Zandt was operated on this site. By 1910, the land was owned by J. A. Evans. In 1912, just two months after the sinking of the Titanic, the city of Fort Worth purchased 37.5 acres from Mr. Evans for $7,500. One month later, on July 15, the new purchase was formally named Rock Springs Park.

Little was done with the land until 1925, when the city, after a bond election, retained the services of Hare and Hare, a landscape architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri, to design plans for a garden in the park. Hare and Hare had designed many of the finest park systems and university campuses in the United States. The first phase of the design called for the development of Rock Springs Park, which was completed in 1931. The city’s forester worked with the existing springs and supervised the construction of waterfalls, spillways, and pools. The newly formed pools, however, did not retain water. To correct the situation, park staff borrowed Queen Tut, the Fort Worth Zoo’s well-known elephant, to wallow in the pools to compact the bottom and sides of the lagoons. The plan worked!

The second phase of design called for the construction of a rose garden. However, the Depression had hit and the city had no funding to proceed. Under President Hoover, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) loaned money to states for local work projects. In 1932, the city applied for funding, and in 1933, the RFC agreed to provide the funds to construct the rose garden. Over the next 15 months, 750 laborers worked in two-day shifts for $2 per day. Four thousand tons of Palo Pinto sandstone and more than 10,000 yards of soil were used by these men to construct the terraces and walks of the rose garden. These same men donated $75 from their meager wages to buy the first roses to be planted. As the first unemployment relief project in Fort Worth, the rose garden at Rock Springs Park was dedicated on Oct. 15, 1933. Just a year later, on Dec. 18, 1934, the board of park commissioners renamed Rock Springs Park the Fort Worth Botanic Garden.

In June 1935, the Fort Worth Garden Club opened a garden center (now the Rock Springs Center) as the first established garden center in Texas. A second greenhouse was added to this building in 1950. Today, that greenhouse showcases part of the garden’s extensive begonia collection.

The major project in the garden during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was the construction of the Japanese Garden, a 7.5-acre garden that is now the crown jewel of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. In 1968, the city employed Kingsley Wu, professor of environmental living at Texas Women’s University, to design a master plan for the Japanese Garden.  The three major pools were staked and then 454 cubic yards of concrete were poured to line the pools. A waterfall, spillways, and islands were fashioned in and around the pools.  Patterned after the Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, the meditation garden was built in 1970.

In 1979, the trial garden was constructed to display new introductions of annuals and perennials. Today, it is the largest public trial garden of perennials in North Texas. Development of the garden continued through the 1980s with the completion of the new 17,000-square-foot Deborah Beggs Moncrief Garden Center and the 10,000-square-foot conservatory in 1986.

During the past 75 years, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden has developed from the original 37.5 acres of Rock Springs Park to its current 109 acres in the middle of Fort Worth’s cultural district. The garden contains 23 theme gardens and offers its 700,000 visitors each year an opportunity to explore botanical wonders in the midst of an urban setting. Find out more about this remarkable garden on its web site at www.fwbg.org.

About the author: Steve Huddleston is the senior horticulturist at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. He is the co-author, with Pamela Crawford, of Easy Gardens for North Central Texas.

Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden with a visit to the special display in the Garden Center, now through Nov. 15. The unveiling of a plaque recognizing the garden’s being placed on the National Register of Historic Places is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 30, 4 p.m., at the Rose Garden Shelter House. Guests for the free event will include Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief, Fort Worth Parks and Community Services Director Richard Zavala, and former Director of the National Park Service and Fort Worth native Bob Stanton.