Dallas Arboretum

The only place in a Texas summer where a family can be outdoors comfortably, and the one we return to most. The trick is the membership and the morning.

There is a stretch of the Texas year, roughly May through September, when being outside with three children is not a plan but a hazard. Afternoons hit a hundred and two. The window for anything outdoors closes around eleven in the morning and does not reopen.

The Arboretum is how we solve that, and the solution has two parts, neither of which is the garden itself.

The membership changes what kind of place it is

Paying at the gate makes every visit a small negotiation — is it worth the drive, is it worth the price, will the kids last long enough to justify it. A membership deletes that conversation. You go because it is nine in the morning and you are awake, and if you stay forty minutes that is fine.

Which means the place stops being a destination and becomes infrastructure. That is a different relationship with a garden, and a better one.

The morning walk is the actual product

We take the kids around on a stroll. It is pleasant in a way that nothing else outdoors is in July, and it turns out to be a serious amount of walking without any of us treating it as exercise — one of these mornings put Peter at seven thousand steps, the highest count in months, and it did not feel like a workout at any point.

For the children it is the same trade. They are covering real distance, outdoors, in tolerable air, and what they think they are doing is looking at things. The Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden is inside the grounds if you want somewhere to aim for.

What we come back for

Two events, every year, without discussion. The pumpkin village in the fall and the Christmas display in the winter. Those are the visits we plan around rather than fall into.

The sculptures

They put sculpture out through the grounds, and it is reliably strange. Often funny, occasionally sad, sometimes both in the same object.

At the moment the grounds are full of enormous rabbits, which would have made sense in April and looks, in late July, like a party nobody thought to clean up after. Aini could not stop counting them the first time we walked past.