Dallas Arboretum’s Mary Brinegar thinks it’s time to take off her ‘velvet fist’

Many individuals name the Dallas Arboretum “Mary’s Backyard.”

That’s as a result of Mary Brinegar, president and CEO of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Backyard Society Inc., has spent 27 years elevating greater than $100 million to rework it from simply one other bucolic picnic spot right into a world-class horticultural vacation spot.

“Fairly frankly, 90% of what’s seen on the backyard was constructed or restored below her watch,” stated retired banker Bob Thornton, who was the aboretum’s chairman when Brinegar was employed in 1996. “I name Mary the ‘Velvet fist.’ She will smile so sweetly and be so good. However she is metal. She will get it achieved. There’s not one factor ‘fluffy’ about her.”

That’s been very important, Thornton says, as a result of there are such a lot of transferring components to the 66 acres alongside White Rock Lake together with climate that may’t be managed. “There’s at all times a problem, at all times an issue, at all times a dragon that must be slayed. You need to keep on prime of all of it to deal with it. And she or he does.”

Brinegar is prepared for another person to be the dragon slayer.

“Once you’re wanting on the milestone of turning 75, you assume. ‘Oh my gosh. How for much longer do I keep?’ ” she stated.

Having hit that milestone in October, Brinegar says she’s achieved greater than she ever dreamed.

As an alternative of Dallas Blooms being the arboretum’s do-or-die pageant, the backyard holds year-round festivals and occasions that assist draw one million new and returning guests every year.

When Brinegar confirmed up, there have been about 2,000 members. At present there are 46,245 supporters, together with 500 who give $3,500 to $50,000 a yr. The preferred stage is the $151 household membership.

Brinegar remembers when kids had been taught nature and science below bushes. Now there’s the Rory Meyers Youngsters’s Journey Backyard, the place almost one million kindergarten by means of Sixth-grade college students have come to work together because it opened in 2013.

Brinegar says she’s not Sort A aggressive, however she is deadline oriented. “I understand how a lot I’ve to usher in by a sure date. I do know what I’ve to do to fulfill the deadline. I imply, I’m on it,” she stated. “However I’m motivated by concern of not making the objective.”

She had deliberate to retire in 2020 however stayed on due to the monetary helter-skelter created by the pandemic.

Then got here final yr’s lethal winter storm.

“It appeared like [Gone with the Wind’s] Tara after the warfare,” she stated. “There have been useless vegetation in all places.”

It price greater than $500,000 to scrub up and replant. “Grand previous azaleas that had been with us for years couldn’t make it,” she stated. “Insurance coverage doesn’t cowl something that grows.”

This summer season’s warmth wave price the arboretum $400,000 in gate gross sales.

Even so, the arboretum completed the yr within the black for the twenty ninth consecutive yr and maintained its million-visitor standing.

Brinegar will flip over stewardship as quickly as her substitute is employed and introduced on top of things.

Dave Firehand left Disney World in Orlando 22 years in the past to go up Brinegar’s horticultural workforce. He says he’s by no means had a second of remorse.

“She’s completely my boss,” he stated. “However she completely trusts us to carry out and do nice work. That’s strain, nevertheless it’s good strain. She has such religion in her folks to do good issues that you simply actually attempt to step up and make that mark.”

Deep Dallas roots

So how did Brinegar change into the queen bee of the arboretum?

It actually wasn’t her horticultural data or gardening abilities.

Her yardman, Ruben Cardoza, saved her Preston Hole garden and flower beds tidy however actually not Dwelling & Backyard worthy. “After I got here house after I realized that I’d gotten the job, I stated, ‘Ruben, we’re in bother.’ “

She moved to a high-rise a number of years later as a result of folks saved eager to take footage of her yard. “An excessive amount of strain there,” she stated.

Brinegar grew up on Lakewood Boulevard, the eldest of three ladies and a boy born to a outstanding Dallas household.

Her nice grandfather, William Stiles, was a founding father of Southern Methodist College. Her father, Frank Brinegar, had profitable property and casualty insurance coverage and actual property corporations. Her mom, Rosemary Thornton Brinegar, was the daughter of four-term Dallas mayor R.L. Thornton and the namesake of the town’s freeway.

Mary went to Dallas public colleges, graduating from Woodrow Wilson Excessive College in East Dallas in 1965, and obtained her diploma in elementary training from SMU 4 years later.

“We had a motto from my grandfather: ‘Work onerous. Do proper. Give again,’” she stated. “I by no means wished to commerce on my identify, slightly preferring simply to be identified for the individual I’m.”

‘Reply the rattling telephones’

That’s one purpose Brinegar, who was fortunately ensconced because the second in command to former normal director Plato Karayanis on the Dallas Opera, turned down quite a few possibilities to interview for the arboretum job when a headhunter saved calling.

Bob Thornton is her cousin, and she or he didn’t need anybody to assume that she wanted household connections to land a job.

Thornton recused himself from the hiring course of. “Due to this fact, nobody might come again later and say that it was a stacked deck,” the retired vice chairman JPMorgan Chase-Dallas stated.

On Brinegar’s first day on the job, she known as her cousin and informed him she by no means wished to be handled otherwise from every other worker.

Thornton informed her to recover from it and gave her three duties to be mounted by the top of the week.

His prime precedence?

“Get somebody to reply the rattling telephones,” Thornton recalled.

A receptionist dealt with all incoming calls, and when she was overwhelmed or wanted a break, she merely turned off the telephone strains.

It was a simple repair.

Neither Thornton nor Brinegar remembers what her second and third fast hits had been.

However the board’s long-term priorities had been clear. The arboretum had run by means of 4 presidents in 12 years and wished somebody to get a grip on weak funds.

On the prime of the whiteboard diagram was “diversify earnings streams,” recollects then-board member Norm Bagwell, chairman of Financial institution of Texas, who at the moment heads the arboretum’s CEO council.

On the time, Dallas Blooms accounted for 70% of the arboretum’s $3 million working funds. If it rained throughout the spring pageant and other people didn’t present up, the backyard had bother making payroll and paying payments for the remainder of the yr.

This yr’s upcoming Dallas Blooms is predicted to usher in about 6% of the $28 million the arboretum will spend in 2023.

The remaining will come from expanded venues, further summer season, fall and vacation festivals, 5 public occasions, training courses, pictures, leases and group gross sales. It has additionally bought the naming rights for nearly every thing she might consider however restrooms and parking tons.

Through the years, Ann Stuart, retired chancellor of Texas Lady’s College, has donated almost $750,000 for numerous tasks. “Mary asks, and also you don’t say no,” Stuart stated. “What you select to help is at all times executed to the very best commonplace. She is the most effective.”

Main from the trenches

Brinegar will get down into the weeds wherever further fingers are wanted, stated vp Terry Lendecker. “She by no means asks her workforce to do something that she will not be keen to do herself. She’s down within the trenches with us.”

She has sealed huge donor offers on golf carts, sped up valet service by shuttling automotive parkers to retrieve vehicles and bussed tables throughout a restaurant staffing disaster.

“She reads each single touch upon the every day visitor surveys, solutions each single telephone name and e mail and, too usually, takes issues to coronary heart,” Lendecker stated. “With that stated, that’s what has made the arboretum what it’s in the present day.”

Karen Reardon, a longtime buddy who has labored for Brinegar for nearly 20 years, agrees. “Mary could be very calm and calls for 100% of staff with velvet gloves and a gentle voice. She will go to lunch with a donor and are available again to the workplace with a verify for one million {dollars}. She is aware of everybody in Dallas, they usually all love her.”

However not everybody feels liked.

Three former staff have pending complaints with the town of Dallas and the U.S. Equal Employment Alternative Fee alleging that they had been unjustly fired by the arboretum — one for being homosexual, one other for utilizing gender-inclusive pronouns and a 3rd for discrimination.

Lendecker says the arboretum “has submitted place statements requested by the EEOC and absolutely cooperated with all investigations. We’re simply awaiting EEOC determinations.”

Brinegar says the fits have “completely nothing” to do with the timing of her retirement and that she was surprised by them, having been a proponent of range and inclusion applications since her days on the opera within the ‘90s.

She was the driving power behind the arboretum’s Hispanic Heritage Celebration in September, which leads into Black Heritage Celebration, adopted by Satisfaction in Bloom.

“I look ahead to having all of this behind us,” she stated.

Drunk raccoons, loud peacocks

Brinegar is named a raconteur — the gal everybody needs to take a seat with at social occasions.

The arboretum has given her loads of materials.

Amongst her favourite tales?

One summer season, the arboretum handed out slices of watermelon that dripped on folks’s garments and attracted bees. Youngsters spilled sticky watermelon juice all around the walkways, making a clean-up mess and attracting critters at evening.

On multiple event, raccoons raided trash baggage, acquired drunk on the alcohol leftovers from events and wandered across the grounds in a stupor.

“Individuals thought they should be diseased. I stated, ‘Oh no, they’ve simply had their very own joyful hour.’ “

There was additionally the case of the screeching peacocks.

The horticulture workers purchased a peacock female and male on the Canton flea market. However as quickly as they had been launched within the backyard, they flew north, by no means to be seen once more. A minimum of not by the parents on the arboretum.

Three years later, the arboretum acquired a telephone name from somebody within the neighborhood saying that the peacocks’ screeching might wake the useless they usually wanted to be eliminated.

The birds had been secretly residing in a giant bamboo stand on the fringe of the arboretum property. They’d fly into the neighborhood, make their presence identified after which settle again into the bamboo at evening.

An arboretum staffer added the aviary interlopers to his animal menagerie at his giant farm.

When folks ask Paul Redman, CEO of the celebrated Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, to checklist the highest public gardens in North America, the Dallas Arboretum at all times makes his checklist.

“Mary’s management is a beacon of inspiration and affect for our occupation,” he stated, including aspiring botanical leaders from world wide will undoubtedly apply to switch her as CEO.

“I’ve little question, due to her love for the backyard, that she, in partnership with the backyard’s board, will do every thing inside their energy to make it possible for whoever is the subsequent chief is about up for achievement.”

Discovering the ‘subsequent Mary’

Brinegar is staying out of the method.

“I’ve such respect for thus many nonprofit leaders in Dallas,” Brinegar stated. “I do know the administrators of all the main gardens within the nation. I don’t wish to be lobbied, however extra importantly, I don’t wish to decide one from the most effective. So I’m simply sitting on the sidelines.”

The “subsequent Mary” must navigate the pursuits of the board, donors, guests, workers, volunteers and neighbors.

Above all else, these interviewed agreed, her successor should share her ardour for the arboretum and its mission.

Dallas banker and arboretum board member Will McDaniel is heading the interior search workforce that’s hiring a headhunter to fill the CEO slot.

“Mary has taken the grasp plan, labored with many boards of administrators over time and helped implement that plan with grace and willpower,” stated McDaniel, senior vp of Financial institution of America. “Our subsequent chief must have the imaginative and prescient to take this backyard to the subsequent stage whereas preserving its historical past and sustaining excellence in horticulture and festivals.”

In response to the nonprofit’s newest obtainable Type 990 tax filings, Brinegar earned $450,000 in 2020. McDaniel says it’s too early to provide a wage vary for her substitute.

“I’m glad that the highlight is shining on Mary for all that she’s achieved,” Thornton stated. “What folks have issue understanding is that this beautiful, fantastic backyard is right here on the North Texas prairie the place they didn’t even have bushes, flowers or something.”

Brinegar says that she’s no one-woman band. She’s had an orchestra at her disposal. And that’s one thing that can help whoever steps in.

“If I didn’t have folks to dream with me, to assist us increase the cash for issues to occur, for the donors who believed within the dream and other people serving to us monitor each development mission to ensure we obtained the service and high quality the backyard deserves, we might have by no means gotten many of those tasks off the bottom,” Brinegar stated, after which takes a breath. “Wow! What a sentence!

“What has made the backyard nice? Now we have tried new issues, constructed new displays and constructions — that make us distinctive — and introduced folks to the backyard to see the most effective in horticulture, the explanation for our existence.”

AT A GLANCE: The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Backyard

Opened: 1984

Possession: Public/personal partnership. Town of Dallas owns the property and is supported by the Dallas Park and Recreation Division. It’s operated by the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit group.

Annual funds: $28 million, and the arboretum has operated within the black for 29 consecutive years.

2022 guests: 1 million

Workforce: 174 full-time staff, greater than 50 part-time staff and almost 3,000 volunteers

Members: 46,245

Location: The arboretum is on 66 acres of the historic DeGolyer and the Alex Camp Home estates alongside White Rock Lake. The deal with is 8525 Garland Street, Dallas, TX 75218.

Admission: $5 for January-Feb. 24. Competition pricing for Dallas Blooms: $20 for adults, $16 for seniors 65 and up and $12 for kids 2 to 12. Youngsters 2 years and below are free.

2023 festivals and main occasions: Dallas Blooms: Feb. 25-April 16; Summer time on the Arboretum, June 3-Aug. 6; Cool Thursdays Live performance Sequence, April-June and September-October; Autumn on the Arboretum, Sept. 16-Nov. 5: Vacation on the Arboretum and Christmas Village, Nov. 9-Dec. 31

SOURCE: Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Backyard

AT A GLANCE: Mary Brinegar

Title: President, CEO, Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Backyard

Age: 75

Born: Baylor College Hospital in Dallas

Grew up: Lakewood

Schooling: Woodrow Wilson Excessive College, 1965; Southern Methodist College, bachelor of arts diploma in elementary training, 1969

Earlier expertise: KERA/Channel 13 and the Dallas Opera for 9 years every

Private: Single

SOURCES: Mary Brinegar; Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Backyard