A Landscape Designer’s 40-Year Garden Oasis in Dallas

Five minutes from downtown Dallas, behind a single garden gate, landscape designer Robert Bellamy has spent almost 40 years building an oasis so green you forget you're surrounded by townhomes.

Robert is a residential landscape designer who installs architectural features and loves, above all, a sense of surprise — something appearing around a corner nobody expected, often with a streak of humor. His own garden is the fullest expression of that. He's softened the land into rolling berms and knolls of trees, and scattered it with architectural salvage that invites you to wander left, right, or straight ahead.

Thirty to forty years, he notes, can really make a garden. Fountains anchor everything, because to him water everywhere is good energy. There's one made from an old electrical-station transistor fitted with a faucet, beloved by the birds. Another, his first, sits near the street to mask traffic noise and has weathered beautifully.

Newer additions include a large LED light box salvaged from a downtown building that cycles through five colors at night, and a contemplative outdoor "room" — inspired by the garden rooms he saw in Newport, Rhode Island — walled in green, holding a shrine, a funky mirror, and a bench for early summer mornings.

At the far end stands the garden house, the original home Robert lived in for some 37 years, built partly from scraps and crowned by a stained-glass window his friend Judy de Sanders made in the early 1970s, set with wine goblet stems and prisms that throw dancing light across the floor in winter.

Around it he's built a compound of outdoor structures from fragmented stone and collected architectural pieces: an open-air dining space inspired by Guatemala and the south of France, a sunken tile fireplace he believes was one of Dallas's first outdoor ones, a bar room, a greenhouse full of canaries, and a recently finished outdoor kitchen with a wood-burning oven he's still learning to master.

A niece was married here just weeks ago. For Robert, the soul of the place is the moment you open the gate — lost to the outside, looking at sky and texture and old, old trees instead of the city all around.