Maureen Heffernan , the Maine transplant who oversaw the rebirth of the Myriad Gardens and the launch of Scissortail Park , is stepping down from that job after bringing national acclaim to Oklahoma City’s top park attractions.
Heffernan was director of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens when she accepted a job offer in 2011 to oversee Oklahoma City’s Myriad Gardens and future Scissortail Park. And if not for a marriage proposal from a fellow horticultural enthusiast, she admits she might have stayed in Oklahoma City until retirement.
“It's so bittersweet to leave, there is so much I want to do but I'm thrilled about my new chapter,” Heffernan said. “When I first got here, I was taking a risk. But what an interesting opportunity it was to be a part of an urban transformation.”
Heffernan is set to leave on Aug. 31. After getting engaged in April, she married George Ball , owner of the Burpee Seed Company. He is a Horticultural Society of New York trustee and from 1990 to 1993 he was president of the American Horticultural Society.
His biography credits Ball with creating hundreds of innovative, high-quality flower, fruit and vegetable varieties. In addition, he has worked on vegetable seed relief projects in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Afghanistan.
“There will be a lot of interesting projects to move on to,” Heffernan said. “Burpee has a lot of interesting gardens and horticultural projects that I'll want to get involved with.”
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Larry Nichols, chairman of the Myriad Gardens Foundation and vice chairman of the Scissortail Park Foundation, is overseeing a national search for Heffernan’s replacement. Nichols got increasingly involved in the future of the Myriad Gardens when improvements to the park were funded through tax increment financing generated by the construction of a new headquarters for Devon Energy, the company he co-founded with his late father, John Nichols.
“When we hired Maureen, we were already spending some money from the Devon TIF to totally redo the Myriad Gardens,” Nichols said. “It was literally a glass tube with dated plants surrounded by large trees and red clay.”
The gardens were envisioned by the late Dean A. McGee as a regional attraction when planning started in the early 1970s. The project went through funding shortfalls when pledges evaporated due to fortunes lost in the 1980s oil bust. The gardens opened in 1988 but never matched the vision of McGee, who died in 1989.
Nichols said he realized how far the gardens fell short of its potential when interviewing designers and architects for the task of transforming it into a true destination for locals and visitors.
“As I was taking tours, we walked through downtown and Bricktown and got the eyes of very objective people looking at the gardens,” Nichols said. “That opened my eyes to see how underused the Myriad Gardens really was. It was surrounded by berms, a maze of sidewalks with dead-ends, not a very inviting place to go. There were not any events, it wasn’t an exciting place to go.”
In the time since, the Myriad Gardens has undergone a complete makeover that added a children’s garden and outdoor stage, upgraded the garden’s water stage, botanical tube, lobby and entrance.
The gardens are now routinely filled with people walking, enjoying outdoor movies, learning about horticulture. Marriage proposals, weddings and quinceañeras are commonplace at the gardens.
In addition to showing summer movies, the gardens also are home to a winter ice skating rink, a fall Pumpkinville festival, and more recently, the launch of an annual tulip festival .
“It's crammed with activities and filled with events all the time,” Nichols said. “Maureen has done a great job of leading us from that point as a construction site to where it is today.”
A blank slate at Scissortail Park
Heffernan didn’t just have a blank slate at the gardens, Nichols said, but was tasked with working with a blank slate with Scissortail Park.
“With Scissortail, you have both the upper park and lower park, which are very different and have different opportunities,” Nichols said.
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In just a few short years, Heffernan grew a staff of about 20 people by more than 120 full-time and part-time employees as Scissortail attracted thousands of visitors with free concerts, farmers’ markets, festivals and winter holiday displays at the north upper park. The lower park, meanwhile, is routinely filled with hundreds of people using its soccer and basketball courts and picnic pavilions.
Jim Tolbert, who inherited the leadership role at the Myriad Gardens upon the death of Dean A. McGee, said Heffernan kept the late oilman and philanthropist’s vision alive by maintaining the emphasis on horticulture.
“We’re very much in her debt,” Tolbert said. “I hope we can find someone who is as knowledgeable and committed as she is.”
Marlo Turner, vice president of development for the park and the gardens, will step in as an interim director while Mark Tarnachi, a head-hunter with Phillips Oppenheim who recruited Heffernan, will launch a national search for her successor.
Nichols said a typical search can take between four and six months. The new director will be tasked with working with the city on renovating and programming the historic Union Station in the heart of Scissortail Park.
Parking, especially adjacent to the lower segment of Scissortail Park, is already in short supply and cars can often be seen parked at nearby vacant properties. Development is starting to the west of the lower park and is inevitable on the former scrapyards to the east of the lower park and empty lots to the west of the upper park.
“The job is never done,” Nichols said. “But the opportunity in attracting someone to oversee world-class parks should attract a large number of applicants.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Maureen Heffernan who transformed Myriad Gardens, opened Scissortail Park, set to say goodbye
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