Misinformation abounds over plans for Botanic Garden
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Nearing its 100th year as a park, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden is ready for a makeover.
By its centennial in 2012, the old garden can bloom again with flowers, the way it used to when the Rose Garden was built in the 1930s as an addition to 1912-vintage Rock Springs Park.
It'll take money. But givers are ready to help plant flowers, dig gardens and restore the rose terrace and shelter house, built in 1934 and eligible to become national landmarks.
And it'll take your support.
A committee of friends and neighbors has drawn a plan to add flowers, build a scenic walk and turn the old park into a landscape showcase.
Nobody wants to draw the comparison out loud, but the plan would give Fort Worth a colorful garden like the 66-acre Dallas Arboretum, home of the Dallas Blooms festival.
There might be some changes, though. Flowers don't mix well with cars, so the old road through the park might become a walking path and tramway.
A proposed west entrance could welcome visitors off Montgomery Street near Linden Street. That would be near planned new Cultural District parking near a front gate that would lead to the rose terrace and elaborate Japanese Garden.
"We spent a lot of time in the Botanic Garden," planner James Toal said at a public forum Wednesday night, discussing the plan by local architecture and design firm Gideon Toal. "Over and over, people would walk up and say, 'Where is the garden?' That's because they really don't know where they're supposed to start."
Right now, gardengoers wander in, park, then wander out.
They might find the new children's Native Forest Boardwalk but never drive all the way west to the roses or the Japanese Garden's koi ponds.
The plan mostly refines the enclave into what Toal called a "manicured, ornamental garden" with its own gateway, parking and walkway, shifting the entrance from South University Drive and the older Trinity Park.
Some residents from the nearby Mistletoe Heights and Berkeley Place neighborhoods attended the public forum with questions. They like wandering through the garden without gates and they like that there are no rules that might prevent football games or dogs playing Frisbee among the flowers.
(Don't worry about the annual Concerts in the Garden summer music series on the garden lawn. It's part of the plan.)
Deb Nyul of Berkeley Place represents south-side residents on the city parks board. She had sent residents a warning about how the changes would "alter the use of the garden" to "serious botanical study."
She said at the forum that her primary concern is that the garden would someday charge admission. The Japanese Garden costs up to $3.50, but right now, the rest of the garden is free.
Elaine Petrus, chairwoman of a Friends of the Garden Committee dominated by garden benefactors, told the audience that the plan does not include a fee, and that the final decision would belong to the City Council.
"I don't want the discussion of future goals for the garden to get wrapped up in talk about a fee," she said.
Jim Johnson of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., a former member of the parks advisory board, said afterward that he likes the plan and trail, but that he wants to keep Frisbee games in the garden and free admission.
"We tend to like things free in Fort Worth," he said. "Free parking -- free parks."
Maybe somebody should remind him that nothing in Fort Worth is really free.
The generous gifts of kind families and foundations underwrite our art, history and science museums. Taxpayers finance downtown parking and public parks.
It'll take money from both to restore the Botanic Garden.
Online: www.fwbg.org
bud@star-telegram.com
