Director of landscape management Kevin Dilliard pulls the golf cart to the curb of the tree-lined street between the Meadows Museum and Cockrell-McIntosh Commons. He hops out. “I’ve got to send a picture here,” he says, grabbing his cell phone from the bulky holster attached to his black leather belt. He wears black plants with a red long-sleeved button down with “SMU Facilities” embroidered over the chest pocket. His cuffs are buttoned tight around his wrists. He has excellent posture, neatly combed white hair, and carefully ironed pants. The main clue that he does more than sit behind a desk all day is the creases in his black leather loafers. That and the cell phone holster. He snaps a picture of a drooping tree branch, explaining that this is a big part of his job — riding around campus and taking note of any imperfections in the landscaping. He sends the picture to a crew member who will take care of it. “Contractors,” he mutters as he slides back into the cart, “tearing things apart.”

Dilliard, after 23 years at SMU, retires at the end of December. Dilliard leads the design, execution and upkeep of greenery of the campus, which was named one of America’s most beautiful by Architectural Digest this spring. Riding around campus, it’s easy to see why. There’s not a single piece of trash on the brick walkways. Every flowerbed is a riot of color. And the grass of Dallas Hall Lawn, which saw an increase in foot traffic from Boulevard-goers after SMU joined the ACC, is a solid field of green.

“We don’t paint it in the middle of the night,” he laughs, dispelling a popular rumor about the lawn’s never fading hue. Sometimes, he admits, they use a colorant on duller patches if it’s absolutely necessary. But they do it in broad daylight, he insists, eyes twinkling behind his rectangular glasses.

Dilliard grew up on a farm outside a small town in Illinois. His midwestern accent is still noticeable after decades as a Texan. His family moved off the farm and into town when he was 5, and Dilliard remembers growing up surrounded by plants and animals. After highschool, he studied forestry and horticulture at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He met his wife Julie, a nursing student, at Southern Illinois, and they moved to Dallas when she got a job as a nurse practitioner. He worked at the Dallas Arboretum and in private landscaping before starting at SMU in 2002, seven years into SMU president R. Gerald Turner’s tenure. Turner focused more on landscaping than the previous president, explained Brian Martin, who’s worked on SMU’s irrigation system since 1995. “He wanted it to be green,” Martin says, and Dilliard worked to push along the change Turner had enacted.

Dilliard’s favorite part of the job is cultivating the hidden corners of campus, like the beds right by Turner’s parking spot. Nancy George, the associate director of SMU’s media relations, appreciates Dilliard’s dedication to perfection. She learned that if she had an interview or photoshoot scheduled for outside, she could let Dilliard know and he made sure that no leaf blowers were nearby and the flower beds were mulched to perfection. His ethos for SMU’s landscaping is management, not maintenance.

“Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow is better than today,” he says. “Everything should be getting better. It’s not status quo.”

The flower beds are redesigned for every season to ensure the brightest blooms and most seasonally appropriate colors.
Chemistry professor Nicolay Tsarevsky’s favorite spot on campus is the landscaping between Fondren Science and Dedman Life Science, where he’ll go for fresh air during long days in the lab. “They’re actually medicinal plants,” he says. Right between the chemistry building and the biology building, two disciplines that deal with the development of medicines and drugs. “That cannot be coincidental, right?”

Tsarevsky learned that it is not, in fact, coincidental, when Dilliard took Tsarevsky’s “Science and Society Class,” a required course for doctoral students in the Simmons Doctor of Liberal Studies program. Tsarevsky was impressed with Dilliard’s encyclopedic knowledge of plants. Tsarevsky has his own home garden, which he fills with plants that he can use in experiments. When Dilliard asked Tsarevsky to be the advisor for his thesis, Tsarevsky saw how much work and research Dilliard puts into choosing plants for campus. Dilliard researches not only which plants can survive the Texas summer or what colors look nice next to Dallas Hall, but how the plants can reflect and enhance their surroundings.

“There are elements of a little bit of history, a little bit of art, a little bit of science,” Tsarevsky says. “This is a beautiful, interdisciplinary type of work.”

Dilliard received his doctorate of liberal studies from SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development in 2022. He focused his thesis on the impact of college campus landscaping on student recruitment and retention. He hoped to prove that good landscaping would increase student recruitment and retention. And he did.

“It’s not just a claim,” said Tsarevsky. “In science, we are not satisfied with claims. We have to test whether our hypothesis is correct or not right. You have to have some kind of strategy to really analyze that. And he did it all.”

Dilliard hopes his research helps legitimize the work of landscape departments at universities across the country. When schools cut costs, he says, landscape budgets are some of the first to go. SMU recently prioritized an overhaul of the landscaping around the Laura Lee Blanton building, where all prospective student tours begin. He views the Blanton revamp as a validation of his research. More than that, though, he loves to hear the personal impacts his work has on students. He wants everyone to feel at home; he incorporates the Colorado blue columbine to make Colorado students feel at home, even if it’s just subconsciously.

Senior Violet Enes spent the beginning of her freshman year mourning the fall foliage of her northeast boarding school. But she noticed the trees lining her walk to class past Moody Coliseum.

“They turned orange,” she said, “and it really reminded me of fall and of home.” Enes, now a senior, leads campus tours for prospective students.

Ryan Cole, an SMU alum and the current Assistant Dean for Recruitment and Admission for Meadows School of the Arts, sees the impact of Dilliard’s research everyday as he talks to potential and current students.

“I think one of the things that’s really crucial in a learning environment is that you feel comfortable and safe enough to let your guard down and actually engage with learning,” Cole says.

Like they gossip about the Dallas Hall Lawn grass being painted, SMU students also exaggerate the frequency of the changing flower beds. Some claim that new flowers are planted every week. It sounds a little wasteful, the constant rotation of plants. But sustainability is a cornerstone of the SMU landscaping department. While most flowerbeds get a revamp every season, Dilliard will replant any perennials in other spots on campus that he thinks are a little bare. The true annuals, which are plants that only last a season, are all composted through Southern Botanical, a local landscaping company that SMU contracts most of the physical landscape work out to. Some of the shrubs on campus have been around for over 20 years.

“I don’t like to throw anything away,” Dilliard said. “That’s the way my dad was raised. He was an old farmer, born in the 20s, grew up in the Depression — he kept everything. I’m just my father’s son.”

His focus on sustainability carries over to his home garden in Richardson. He waters as much as he can from two big rain barrels. The side tables on his back porch are cut from rottings poles he had to replace. He talks passionately about Richardson’s recycling program. And when he ends up removing a lot of plant material, he takes it to work so it can be composted.

After spending all week working with landscaping at SMU, Dilliard comes home and spends Saturday in his garden. “Usually about eight hours,” he says, examining his Mexican bird of paradise tree for seed pods. The plants in front of the beige one-story in Richardson are well-kept, but certainly not as uniform as the gardens at SMU. Home is his place to experiment. He knows each plant intimately — where he got the Mexican petunia (Bruce Miller Nursery in Richardson), how many of his encore azaleas he’s lost to January freezes (nine), and what visitors say his Texas mountain laurel smells like when it blooms (Grape Kool-Aid). The side yard is dedicated to a vegetable and herb garden, which he’s hoping to revamp once he’s retired.

The backyard is the real star of the show. Surrounded by high fences, it’s a lush and colorful oasis. Colorful iron sea turtles and butterflies hang on the fences, and birdbaths and windmills are interspersed with the purple ground cover. The sea turtle is from a trip to Key West. Dilliard and his wife Julie collect art for their garden when they travel, which they hope to do more of when Julie retires from the North Texas Endocrine Center in the spring. Wind chimes dangle from tree branches, and a red metal cardinal perches near an elephant ear plant. The cardinal is a nod to Dilliard’s father, who spent years as a head accountant for the St. Louis Cardinals.

“If you see a cardinal, it’s somebody’s visiting you,” Dilliard says.

It’s the planting and management that Dilliard really loves about his garden. The color, like at SMU, is decided by a higher power.

“He tells me about [his plants] and we look at the blooms, and I get to pick out the colors in the spring,” says his wife Julie.
The Japanese maple is Dilliard’s favorite plant in his yard. It’s a squat and unassuming pick, especially next to the vibrant red hibiscus. The hibiscus is a perennial, and won’t last long. The maple is 20 years old.

“I wanted to give it more room to grow, and it’s done quite well,” Dilliard says.

Dilliard’s successor, Mark Slicker, values the flexible, adaptive approach Dilliard cemented into the department. He started working side-by-side with Dilliard this school year and will take over completely in December. He looks forward to carrying on Dilliard’s legacy of beauty.

“We’re now moved into the ACC,” he says. “It’s even more of a microscope on the campus.”

Slicker’s favorite spots on campus are the heavy hitters — the Boulevard, Dallas Hall Lawn, the flagpole. Before Dilliard passes the torch, the campus should pause to enjoy the hidden enclaves where his personal touch is most visible.