Former Bartlett Arboretum owner welcomed tens of thousands to her home

Mary Bartlett Gourlay grew up with Bartlett Arboretum as her personal playground and then spent decades welcoming visitors there from around the globe.

The granddaughter of Walter Bartlett, who founded the Belle Plaine attraction in 1910, was 91 when she died Monday after a brief illness.

Though she loved offering arboretum tours and could give the Latin names of every tree on the 19-acre property, Gourlay never dreamed of managing it.

She and her late husband, Bob Gourlay, had helped at the arboretum — or what affectionately became known as the Arb — through the decades and then stepped up to run it when her father, Glenn Bartlett, died in 1976.

“She also had five little bitty kids, so it wasn’t her priority probably until we were a little older,” said Margaret Langley, Gourlay’s daughter.

Gourlay’s parents were living in New York when her mother was pregnant with her in 1932 and took a train to Wellington to give birth.

“She wanted her daughters born in Kansas,” said Robin Macy, current arboretum steward. “She went to great lengths.”

A couple years later, the family returned to Kansas and never left.

Gourlay grew up in a small house at the Arb. She and her girlfriends would camp on a bridge over the Euphrates Creek, where they also went skinny dipping.

It was the same water that, when it would freeze decades later, Gourlay would insist on stomping on before her children tried it.

Former Southwestern College biology professor Max Thompson, who still runs the school’s greenhouses, knew and worked with Gourlay’s parents and then her and described Gourlay as a person with an enthusiastic love of plants.

“She was fully knowledgeable about every tree on the place,” he said.

That included their scientific names, how to grow them and how to keep them going — especially crucial since the Arb is home to a lot of nonnative species.

“I don’t know how she remembered all those names,” said Leslie McVay, Gourlay’s daughter.

On tours, including free ones for children, Langley said her mother shared “her love of the arboretum and all of its history.”

McVay said it was about “creating an interest for the kids.”

“It had to be a labor of love because she was so exhausted by the end of the day,” McVay said.

Gourlay’s life entered a new era when she and her husband realized they had no choice but to sell the Arb. They could no longer care for it, and none of their five children wanted to take it over.

McVay said that was a sad disappointment for her mother, but Langley said at the same time, “She also didn’t want us to because it was such a huge undertaking . . . and financial burden.”

The Gourlays sold to Macy in 1997, and Bob Gourlay died in 2004, but Mary Gourlay continued to return to the Arb in a new capacity.

She became a second mother to Macy and helped guide her early in her tenure.

“I’m sure she was mortified when she could see I clearly knew very little,” Macy said. “She allowed me that grace to not know anything.”

Macy said Gourlay could tell she had an appreciation for the Arb as “a place that was seeped in history and elbow oil,” but Gourlay occasionally “would refer to something as Robin’s folly,” such as a tree house she insisted on building.

“She was right,” Macy said. “It was a liability.”

Gourlay did, though, come to appreciate a new vision Macy brought to the Arb.

“She really became my champion.”

The two shared a bond over lives filled with drought, occasional floods, a lack of money and “never enough of anything,” Macy said.

Gourlay also was the matriarch for what became an army of volunteers known as the Soil Sisters and Brothers.

“She didn’t really lose an arboretum,” Macy said. “She just got a whole bunch more kids.”

Macy said people revered Gourlay but, more importantly, liked her and how fun she was in addition to being forthright.

Gourlay held Sunday-morning breakfast known as Joy for two decades.

“The list is long of the characters who have sat at her kitchen table,” Macy said.

“She wasn’t an old fogy. She was just somebody you wanted to be around.”

Gourlay, who became known as Mama G during these years, returned to the Arb as a volunteer and simply for fun at events and concerts where she was a staple.

That is, except for when KU basketball was on or she was off playing poker, where Gourlay often surprised the mostly men she played with, some of whom didn’t expect an older great-grandmother to know what she was doing.

In addition to her five children, Gourlay had 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren with another on the way.

“She was the glue for that family,” Macy said.

Gourlay died 20 years to the day after her husband, McVay said.

“I know she missed him so much. Hopefully they’re having a joyful reunion.”