One soil-filled teaspoon at a time, this obscure corner of historic Fair Park heals the local environment.
The myriad tiny and painstaking tasks done in this cavernous old greenhouse — the part of Texas Discovery Gardens that the public rarely sees — create nature’s lifeblood to make Dallas a healthier place.
Much of what our planet needs in the battle against global warming, water waste and deteriorating air quality starts on these dirty work tables, thanks to volunteer extraordinaire Roseann Ferguson and her fellow gardeners.
I heard about Ferguson while bringing readers the recent story of the blackland-prairie transformation of the Old Fish Hatchery after a massive clear-cutting devastated a swath of the White Rock Lake preserve two years ago.
With the reintroduction of native flora, some of which had been absent from North Texas for generations, I wanted to see where this plant magic started and meet those responsible.
The Fair Park volunteers attend to the intricate potting and pampering with the same attention to detail — and with the same laughter blown by antiquated fans through the hot, humid space — that I recall seeing around my great-grandmother’s quilting frame.
But these days, it’s a quilting bee for gardeners, handiwork that is the heartbeat of an effort to bring almost impossible-to-find native plants not just to the White Rock restoration but to homeowners’ yards and business properties.
Mark your calendars because the volunteers’ next three-day sale to the public, with proceeds powering the work of Texas Discovery Gardens, begins Sept. 16.
You will find native plants reasonably priced, and you can take a walk through the gardens to see how the specimens might look, when fully grown, in your own landscape.
Even better, the volunteers will already have done the hard part of the gardening.
Because these plants, native to Texas and surrounding regions, have been missing from our local landscapes and open spaces for so long, a year or so of tender loving care is required to establish them from seeds and cuttings.
That makes the work a hard sell for most commercial nurseries; Texas Discovery Gardens can do it only because of its band of volunteers.
But once they gain that foothold, native plants take care of themselves and provide a gorgeous look that, compared to, say, azaleas and hydrangeas, is friendly to the environment, requires less watering and is far more tolerant to our increasingly ridiculous weather extremes.
“These plants all start with Roseann,” said Dick Davis, executive director of Texas Discovery Gardens. “Without her, we couldn’t produce any of them.”
When Roseann retired from a career teaching history in Garland ISD in 2006, she pledged that her life’s next chapter would make the world a better place.
She knew almost nothing about horticulture — and even less about Texas Discovery Gardens — until she read a newspaper article about its magnificent butterfly house. When Roseann visited, a garden staffer, one of Roseann’s former students, urged her to volunteer.
“I have been here ever since,” Roseann told me.
Roseann is a doting mother, grandmother and even great-grandmother, but she admits that it’s the greenhouse work that she thinks about 24-7 and she’s onsite most weekdays by 6:30 a.m.
“We can’t afford to give her days off,” Dick said with a laugh as we watched Roseann pull an industrial-size steel cart loaded with plants from one of the grow areas into the work space.
Roseann has devoted more than 22,000 volunteer hours to the greenhouse work. That’s 550 40-hour weeks and, according to Texas Discovery Gardens’ calculations, the equivalent of more than half a million dollars in value.
“Yes, that’s a lot of plants,” Roseann acknowledged before pushing me off to talk with the other master gardeners working alongside her that day. “They deserve the credit as much as I do.”
But Roseann was clearly tickled when I asked her about the signs being planned that will designate this space — once funds are found for much-needed repairs — as the Roseann Ferguson Greenhouse.
Some here call her the nonprofit’s personal “Mother Nature” and others the unofficial greenhouse manager. Whatever her title, folks know she’s in charge.
Dick said Roseann’s importance is such that it’s “‘yes, ma’am,’ ‘no, ma’am’ to her and if you’re smart, it will mostly be ‘yes, ma’am.’”
Everyone I spoke with Wednesday morning said Roseann is that magnetic cheerleader who is so much fun and so knowledgeable that they love working alongside her.
One of those volunteers, Mary Louise Whitlow, painstakingly transplanted thimble-size Indian Pink into slightly larger pots, as she explained what’s been required to get this now-rare perennial to this point in the growing process.
Because the ripened plant capsules spray their feather-light seeds faster than they can be gathered, Mary Louise put small mesh bags over the Indian pink blossoms in her yard to collect the precious items.
Each seed is subsequently planted and nurtured in hopes of healthy mature plants being ready for a spring sale.
Dallas volunteer Kathy Fitzsimmons told me that, despite already being a master gardener, she’s learned a ton from Roseann. “One third of the plants in my yard are from here as I’ve made the transition to native and adaptive plants,” she said.
With concerns about climate change and water shortages, Kathy said, native plants are the sensible way forward. “There’s this stereotype that they are ugly, but that’s really not true, as you can see in the gardens here,” she said.
The volunteers call their work horticulture therapy. As they hover over the baby plants with their delicate tools, they talk about their families, health matters, recipes — but mostly gardening.
“When something doesn’t work — like you plant some seeds and you’ve done everything perfectly and they just don’t germinate — that’s just part of it,” Roseann said.
Texas Discovery Gardens donates some of what it grows to schools and public spaces. Its plants also will be part of Fair Park’s new 14-acre Community Park when it opens in 2024. Every time Texas Discovery Gardens helps create one more native-plant patch, it sustains the world around us.
Dick told me the volunteers and staff have somewhat “grown ourselves into a corner keeping up with the demand,” especially after the pandemic left people more interested in gardening than ever.
Additionally, about $300,000 in urgent repairs is needed in the greenhouse and irrigation system, of which Texas Discovery Gardens has raised $100,000.
“Right now we are just trying to hold our own and keep our rainy day fund somewhat intact,” Dick said.
I asked all the volunteers what they most wanted readers to know about their work and they shouted in unison, “Go native.”
Roseann, her humor still intact even after hours of work, added this: She may work miracles in Fair Park, but don’t think her home landscape is a “yard of the month” nominee.
“My yard looks like the cobbler’s children’s shoes. I spend all my energy here.”
Given all that’s going wrong with today’s environment, North Texas is lucky she does.
