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Concrete Jungles and Hill Country Forests

Legendary Texan ‘saves’ Central Park, returns to preserve epic Pedernales Valley ranch.

By Louie Bond
Photos by Earl Nottingham

December 2024 Issue

Pedernales Valley

A timeless panorama of the Pedernales Valley expands behind the hilltop easel of 88-year-old Elizabeth “Betsy” Browning Rogers. She presses a thick green marker to one of a string of irregular shapes that line a river on the giant paper map before her. That small box she's shading represents the nearly 1,000-acre ranch where her family and friends have gathered for a barbecue lunch to celebrate a new conservation easement that guarantees preservation of this spring-fed parcel.

With many months of complicated planning and other conservation easements pending, it was pure serendipity that the CL Browning Ranch would become the official transaction that led The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Texas to achieve its million-acre milestone (protecting 1 million acres of Texas), just in time for the nonprofit group's 60th anniversary in our state. It's hard to imagine a more fascinating backstory, flavored with history and romance, redemption and culture and, most of all, love of landscape.

The Browning Ranch, teeming with native and migrating wildlife, boasts its own newly discovered species (a type of seed shrimp Rogers was allowed to name after her father) and an ancient spring that has never faltered, even in recent brutal droughts. And Rogers, the elegant sprite with a palomino ponytail and a piercing azure gaze, is far more than just a Texas girl who dreamed of saving the place of her childhood Texas Hill Country adventures.

In 1942, Caleb Leonidas Browning purchased a Hill Country ranch as a family getaway in eastern Blanco County, 60 miles north of his San Antonio home. Rogers and brothers Robert and Jamie (and often the cousins and neighbors who were in attendance at the recent picnic) played hide-and-seek in the hayloft, frolicked in swimming holes and waterfalls along Honeycut Creek, chased armadillos through the perennial meadows and ate peaches and figs right off the trees. Rogers describes it as “a veritable child's paradise” in her writings.

“It was out here that Betsy caught her first frog,” ranch manager Scott Gardner told the barbecue guests. “This is where Betsy rode her favorite horse, Pee Wee. This is where she had her most memorable and authentic field-to-table meal. I can practically hear Betsy now describing to me the wringing of the bird for the fried chicken.”

Rogers left Texas for Wellesley and an art history degree, then earned a master's in urban planning from Yale University in 1964 before moving to New York City. There, she began a love affair with a far different piece of landscape. With its 843 acres, Central Park is about the same size as her home ranch. But in the late 1970s, it was littered with trash and graffiti and riddled with crime. Mayor Ed Koch appointed Rogers as the park's first administrator in 1979. A year later, she founded the Central Park Conservancy and served as its president for 15 years, combining outstanding fundraising skills with a determination to return the park to the spirit of Frederick Law Olmstead's original vision. It was the first private-public conservation partnership of its kind anywhere in the world, and was an inspiration to urban park advocates everywhere.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Browning Rogers

But that was just one chapter of Rogers' conservation story. Upon her mother's death in 1990, Rogers inherited the family ranch. From afar, she operated it as a bed-and-breakfast while she remained in New York consulting, writing and teaching. During this time, “Betsy founded an approach to park planning and preservation that is now used all over the world — how to save existing parks, create new parks and integrate people and nature,” says Fred Rich, a conservationist, longtime friend and self-admitted “Betsy fanboy.” Her book, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History, has become a keystone work of landscape and garden history courses across the country. But as she launched this movement, the Texas ranch kept calling her home. “That entire time, her heart was in one place, this place,” Rich says.

On a visit back home in 2001, Rogers and her husband, Ted, met their neighbors at Selah-Bamberger Ranch Preserve on the other side of Johnson City. Impressed by David Bamberger's work transforming the “worst ranch in Texas” through innovative techniques, Rogers started thinking in earnest about the long-term future of her own land, and started a restoration project.

Selah's former manager, Scott Gardner, brought his science-based conservation skills to the project, joined by wife Colleen, another Selah recruit. The results are tangible in the flowering meadows and gurgling waterfalls, migrating monarchs and scavenging species all along the food chain that are visible on the land today. For the work to continue beyond the Rogerses' lifetime, though, a different kind of help was needed. They contacted TNC to create an easement, which restricts certain uses of the property to protect its natural or cultural features even after they're gone or if the family sells the land.

“We knew as long as it was in Scott and Colleen's hands, it was in good hands,” Rich says. “But perpetuity is a long time, as we like to say in the land conservation business. Betsy realized this and started thinking about the solution, considering a lot of models.”

The TNC Texas team created partnerships and guided the process as part of their larger goals in the valley (12,000 acres protected there so far) and the state to combat the rapid pace of development and the resulting threats to natural resources.

“The stacked benefits that land protection and conservation bring, such as increased biodiversity and improved water quality and quantity, reach far beyond protected landscapes,” TNC State Director Suzanne Scott says. As all the pieces began to fit together, Betsy's kids — Lisa Barlow Towbin and David Barlow — agreed to accept an ongoing stewardship role that continues this work into the next generation.

“One side of conservation comes from our brains — science and ecology and aquifers and invasives,” Rich says. “The other side comes from our hearts. That's born in love of nature, the love of land, love of place. Betsy's life has completely illustrated both sides of that coin.”

The CL Browning Ranch team — family, neighbors, biologists, conservation groups and more — still has a lot of hard work ahead, but the future looks brighter than ever. “It was quite a surprise for us, a real treat, when we learned that the conservation easement on the Browning Ranch would mark such a significant milestone for TNC in Texas,” Scott Gardner says. “We look forward to promoting land stewardship and the research that we will do on this land together. I feel confident that our best work is in front of us.”


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