H. Dan Heyn collection

H. Dan Heyn (1924-2003) practiced award-winning landscape architecture in Texas for fifty years. He immersed himself in work that afforded him opportunity to express his passions for art, creativity, and love of nature and plants. Dan Heyn was an innovator, Texas's first native plant designer, and he completed projects throughout the state. Heyn played a pivotal role in the genesis of the Texas native plant movement. He befriended, educated, and occasionally begged nurserymen to obtain the plants he wanted for his projects. Heyn took tree contractors into the woods to educate them on native plants. "It was a long, hard fight to get some of these things," Heyn mused (Heyn, 2000).

Heyn's parents brought Dan to Dallas at the age of two. He attended Texas A&M University, graduating in 1949 with a degree in Landscape Art. His attendance at A&M was interrupted by service in the US Navy in WWII, the Pacific arena, where he served as a combat aircrewman from 1943-1946. While studying at A&M, Heyn dated Dottie Wahlquist whom he married in 1947. Subsequently, Dan and Dottie had two children, Henry D. "Hank" Heyn, Jr. of Dallas and Hollis Carolyn Heyn of St. Louis.

A former professor, Robert White, helped Dan to secure his first job with the City Planning Department in Houston. He worked there one and a half years before switching to a position in a Dallas land-planning firm, Otto Phillips Site Planning, which later became Phillips, Procter, and Bowers. The projects during Heyn's five and a half years there included subdivisions, shopping centers, and military housing on various Texas bases. Though tired of subdivision design, Heyn valued the "good training in use of space." "Finally I got this job with Arch Swank, O'Neil Ford, Sam Zisman, and Richard Colley (Associated Architects and Planners). And that was just like you were one of their family. I was the only landscape architect. It was all architects. Which was good. I made a lot of contacts. That's where the good work is - with the architects" (Heyn, 2000).

Heyn worked at Associated Architects and Planners from 1956 until 1959. Subsequently, he became a resident landscape architect at Texas Instruments Dallas corporate offices, from 1959-1962. After three years associated with the architecture firm Beran & Shelmire, he opened his own practice in 1965. A few years later Heyn moved the practice to his Richardson home studio. Beginning in 1959 and continuing until 1999, he worked in association with Architect Frank Thrower. In the beginning, they both had worked at Associated Architects and Planners. Later, they worked jointly on the side. In 1967 Heyn asked Thrower to join him in a partnership, which lasted until 1982. Together they designed many large and significant projects, including Redman Plaza Office Complex, Mountain View Community College, North Lake Community College, and Austin College. Heyn worked with Architect Frank Welch on many projects, including the shelter for Willow Creek Ranch in Sterling County, also known as The Birthday.

As a landscape architect I collaborated on some of his projects beginning in 1983, including the Farmers Branch Public Library and the Central Expressway Highway Corridor Study of Landscape and Amenities. Even though I returned to my home state in 1985, we continued to collaborate on projects, including the Fort Wayne, Indiana YWCA Villa, the Irving Texas Valley Ranch Apartment Complex, and the Kalamazoo Rose Park Veterans Memorial.

Heyn's technique was to use the plant and rock materials of the project areas in innovative and beautiful ways. Specific site plans in Heyn's design work take into consideration not only the building materials of the area, but the extremes of Texas climate including the intense summer heat and low amount of rainfall. Such consideration is evidenced through use of shade, walls, and minimalist water techniques. In turn this generated more demand upon the nurseries and growers to provide these Texas plant species. Subsequent designers, developers, and the general public came to see the beauty and practicality of natives in designed landscapes. Lesser-known plants became commonly known and available. The decades of the 1950s and 1960s were Heyn's most pioneering years of indigenous planting design. Heyn's work demonstrates his contributing role in changing landscape styles or fashions.

Heyn intensely studied Texas regional plant biomes and made astute decisions about translocation of species into different contexts. His work drew accolades from some within the nursery trade, such as Ralph Pinkus. "Always admired Dan Heyn because he was always willing to try not only plants, but design, making it more interesting... One of the first of the better (landscape) architects that did a lot of work with native plants" (Pinkus, 2000). He deliberately fostered a Texas sense of place.

Yet natives were not used exclusively in Heyn's design, both because of the tremendous difficulty of availability and because of conflict with design intent. His work is important because it offered a measured view, or a model, of one effective way to use native species.

Some of the hundreds of landscape projects Heyn designed include Mountain View Junior College, Windsor Mall at Austin College, Texas Instruments Incorporated Industrial Campus, a garden for Cullum & Boren Sporting Goods Store, Redman Plaza, the John C. Dorn Residence, the Clifford Morton Residence, the John & Carol Sewell Residence, the Karnack United States Post Office (for client Lady Bird Johnson), the shelter for Willow Creek Ranch, and the Midland Museum of the Southwest.

--Elizabeth A. Heiny-Cogswell

(Source: Heiny-Cogswell, Elizabeth A. Roots and Shoots of the H. Dan Heyn Vision: Indigenous Planting Design, 1950-1980. Thesis. Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 2002.)

In 2004, Heyn was honored posthumously with the Texas A&M University College of Architecture Outstanding Alumni Award.