Taking root
Houston Botanic Garden plans are underway for completion in 2020
The Houston Botanic Garden is finally sprouting at the 120acre greenspace along Sims Bayou in southeast Houston that was formerly the Glenbrook Golf Course. After years of talk, planning and fundraising, city officials handed over management of the 120-acre site to the nonprofit organization on April 2. Claudia Gee Vassar, the garden’s executive director, hopes to break ground by year’s end and open the gates in late 2020.
Trees for Houston has begun creating an on-site tree farm to raise oaks, cypress and other common varieties for the garden’s reforestation projects. At a second on-site farm, a private contractor will nurture more exotic and flowering specimens before they are moved into place.
Functioning as a living museum, the botanic garden will showcase international and native plant collections, offer classes for children and adults, and host events that embrace the newly verdant settings designed by the international landscape architecture and planning firm West 8.
Elements of the West 8 master plan that were released in 2015 have evolved, largely due to cost, Vassar said: A flashy vehicular bridge lined with potted trees, deemed “iconic” early on, has disappeared from renderings.
But Phase 1 projects still promise dramatic change at the long-neglected golf course. West 8 principal-in-charge Claire Agre said seven themed gardens will open with Phase 1. Some serve dual purposes. For example, a collection of magnolias will adorn the event glade, and the
new Botanic Boulevard that will lead into the property from Park Place Boulevard is “both a road and a collection of oaks,” Agre said.
To appease neighbors who fear increased traffic, the city required the organization to re-orient the entry. (Glenbrook golfers used to approach the property through a neighborhood.) In another nod to the community, visitors won’t pay to access the first 11 acres, including the oak collection, a stormwater-wetlands exhibit and a picnic area near the parking lot.
From there, a pine grove and welcome pavilion will lead paying customers to displays that include a four-acre Global Collection Garden, an Edible Garden that reflects Houston’s cultural diversity and the 3-acre Susan Garver Children’s Discovery Garden, a playful oasis that’s being built from an existing water hazard near the golf clubhouse, which will become an education center.
The Global Collection Garden will be the high point, physically and mentally — a paradise where gardeners will find a transformative experience, “like a place you’ve never been,” Agre said.
Sims Bayou, with an old meander, provides the land’s defining feature, though. “That’s a lot of water frontage, all this ‘edge’ which becomes like armor for the raised gardens at the center,” Agre said. She sees wetlands and a robust native landscape, full of winding paths, as future workhorses of the landscape around the perimeters.
Flooding is always a potential worry, but Vassar notes that the Sims watershed is smaller than others in the city, not as densely developed and channelized with natural banks. “It performed really well during Harvey,” she said. “We will still be raising up areas where we have precious collections and buildings. That’s why we’re putting in detention. But the floodable gardens and wetlands will also show which plants are better to help mitigate flooding. Houston’s relationship with water is a really important theme for us.”
All botanic gardens share a mission to protect rare and exotic plants from extinction, but the choices are more obvious in places like Arizona, where the climate demands cacti and succulents, or the far north, where species must survive frigid weather. Houston’s temperate environment is friendly to specimens from tropical, Mediterranean and arid zones. “It really covers the whole world,” Vassar said.
Core collections — plants that will appear throughout the gardens and help define the character of the whole place — will include camellias, oaks, vines, ferns and magnolias.
Agre envisions a fourseason experience. “You’re hard pressed to compete with azaleas in Houston,” she said. “We’re trying to be less about blooms and more about form and structure.”
While the gardens will open with a starting plant list of about 800 species, Vassar anticipates hiring a globetrotting horticulture director soon who will collaborate with a network of global partners to bring as-yet-undiscovered treasures into the displays.
The botanic garden has raised $21 million of its initial $30 million capital campaign — a goal Vassar expects to stretch to $35 or $40 million. That’s about one-third of West 8’s full vision, looking forward to 20 or 30 years of development.
“It’s probably going to take a generation for the garden to build out,” Agre said. “Any garden looks its worst on Day 1. We’re going to have amazing specimens that mature over time.”
Nancy Thomas, who first proposed the idea for a botanic garden in Houston 30 years ago with her late friend Kay Crooker, knows she probably won’t be around to see that. But she’s thrilled that her life’s work is coming to fruition.
Thomas, who cofounded the Houston Botanic Garden nonprofit in 2002, learned her first planting lessons from her grandmother. She became an avid horticulturalist as a buyer for the Garden Club of Houston’s annual Bulb Mart. During years of visiting botanic gardens across the world, she felt her hometown needed one, too.
“I saw what joy it brought and what serenity can be accomplished with a garden,” she said.