Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

It has really nice red flowers, and there is a white one.

I went to the Dallas Arboretum a couple years back, and they had a big... embankment covered with white laura petalums there right close to the de gallier mansion on the property and so that's a nice one but this is more of a red flower and a burgundy leaf and it is a great substitute for red barberry if you're just tired of red bar you know some folks Years ago, that was about all we had for that little nice burgundy dwarf shrub, but not anymore.

We've got these dwarf loropetalums on the market, so check those out if you're like Bert and you need something to replace your barberry, and it doesn't have stickers.

There's no thorns.

What are you most

proud of, Gene? Uh, I think the, I think the quality of the work that we're doing, we've got four amazing world-class projects going on simultaneously down at the Dallas Arboretum.

And folks,

you should follow them on Instagram.

Thank

you.

The Dallas Arboretum's beautiful projects going on.

That's the one

Masses of one color or nice attractive complementary blends of a couple of colors can look very pretty.

But anyway, a lot of places, I know the Dallas Arboretum often mixes tulips and pansies and you'll get pansies all winter.

Then up come the tulips in the middle of the pansy beds and they'll bloom.

And then when the tulips are through blooming, they actually treat them as annuals and will pull the tulips out and the pansies keep on blooming.

And I just think that's super cool.

And that was something that was just really amazing for me, especially going to the Dallas Botanical Garden, going to Metro Maples for the first time, meeting Scott Hubbell.

That was like, he has a little slice of maple paradise in that kind of Dallas-Fort Worth area.

And then eating some good barbecue with Matt and Bjorn, too.

I thought I was going to be in botanical gardens my whole career, but I really found out that I have a better personality for business.

And so, you know, I ended up at the Dallas Arboretum in charge of plant research and developed the plant trials program there after getting out of grad school.

went on to do writing in the industry, worked with a landscaping company in design and maintenance, went back into retail for a number of years as a general manager of an independent garden center, and then decided that it was time for me to go out on my own.

You know, I have a bit of a problem with authority, so I'm good being the decider and working for myself.

I mean, I have a million questions coming out of that, but I'm curious about the Arboretum days just to start with, like what, what was the research you were doing? What was that work like? And, um, why did you decide to then kind of go into the kind of writing world from there?

So I think I was looking for ways to combine art and aesthetics and plant science into something very applicable.

And I was able to do that at the Dallas Arboretum by, I was brought on to start a plant trials program, to also manage the plant collections at the Arboretum, be in charge of knowing what plants we had, where they were, cataloging them, all that stuff, and then creating the Dallas Arboretum Plant Trials Program, which essentially is you have plant breeders in the industry that are breeding cultivars of flowers and edibles and ornamentals, and they need to be tested in different climates to see how they perform.

And that's what the Breeders submit plants.

I love that garden up there.

And then probably the The maximum when it comes to decorations for fall would be at the Dallas Arboretum.

And they're down there with, I don't know, 100,000 different kinds of, it's just mind-blowing what they plant down there.

But they do put a lot of pumpkins out.

And so go to their website, the Dallas Arboretum, and maybe if you're in that area, check it all out.

Maybe the president went down there after he came up to Oklahoma.

I don't know.

And it reminded me of our times in Texas.

In fact, in East Dallas, we lived down the street from the Dallas Arboretum where dogs weren't allowed.

But it

gave us a chance to be near native plants and things that you could find in that region, which is exactly what the botanical gardens are.