New botanic garden ready to bloom
Old city golf course dramatically transformed into outdoor experience
Houston’s newest natural attraction opens Friday, introducing a new kind of outdoor experience that embraces both civilization and wilderness.
Unlike an arboretum or nature center, the Houston Botanic Garden is a museum of plants with evolving, curated collections to inspire home gardeners and inform scientists, as well as entertain and educate more casual visitors. About 2.5 miles of walking trails wind through it, but unlike a park, it’s not a place to walk the dog. (Only guide animals are allowed.)
Located just across Interstate 45 from Hobby Airport, the 132acre green space has been transformed during the past two years from its previous life as the Glenbrook municipal golf course. The development has been dramatic even since early summer, when planting began in the centerpiece Global Collection.
Along with that area, the six “galleries” of Phase I include a culinary garden, the Susan Garver Family Discovery Garden, a woodland glade for private events that will open later this fall and more open areas of coastal prairie and wetlands.
“Particularly during this time of coronavirus, when people are looking for outdoor spaces to be, it’s a wonderful green asset to have in the neighborhood,” said Houston Botanic Garden president Claudia Gee Vassar.
The garden will also be an outdoor laboratory for students, and its programs will encompass wellness, horticulture and the arts, incorporating a conservation message. “Our hope is that people will come here, be inspired by what they see, and learn to love plants even more and have a greater appreciation, so that they might make small changes in their lives that help to protect the planet,” Vassar said.
The opening festivities happen across four weekends through early November, each celebrating a different Houston
cultural community. This weekend’s focus is Latin America. Later activities highlight Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean. The garden reflects the city, Vassar said, “not only with plants local to our region, but focused on Houston’s global identity.”
First Texas project
This is the first Texas project for the international urban design and landscape architecture firm West 8, which designed the master plan and gardens and leads a huge team of local collaborators who include Harvey Builders, Landscape Art, Clark Condon Associates and Walter P. Moore.
“Houston is such a unique place climactically,” said Donna Bridgeman-Rossi, the director of implementation at West 8’s New York office. “A percentage of plants in the Global Collection are experimental. That’s by design. The mission of the garden is about discovery, collection, curation and research. They really wanted a testing ground to explore what the threshold of growing is in Houston, as the climate changes and evolves. They now have an armature and a framework for that.”
The property also enabled a uniquely layered environment that’s very “light on the touch” of the natural ecosystem, she added.
“The perimeter landscapes all speak to resiliency. The wetland slows the water from the entire site, which has less than 10 percent impervious cover. Then we have the coastal prairie, which offsets the flood volumes in the bayou system,” she said “Instead of turning our back on the bayou, we curate glimpses of it. We bring the flood plains in.”
Drawing people in
Through a fanciful steel gate off Park Place Boulevard, over a bridge and through a mott of oaks, visitors check in at a modest welcome center on a 70-acre island between a Sims Bayou meander and the waterway’s main channel. The contemporary, simple structure of coral stone from the Dominican Republic was designed by San Antonio’s Overland Partners.
West 8 had a hand in flourishes such as the subtle laser-etched patterns in the walls, the lace-like gates, the display of plants peeking through the long portico wall and the portico’s scalloped roof. The building should disappear a bit into background as plants around it mature, functioning like a catcher’s mitt “that draws you in and lets you know where to enter, then becomes a pivot point between the global garden, the culinary garden and the children’s garden beyond,” said architect Rick Archer of Overland. “A lot of it is about shade. A lot is about natural materials and connecting to the garden space.”
The welcome building is only 2,000 square feet, but a 3,000square foot portico with a scalloped roof runs perpendicular to it, creating more than a football field’s length of shade.
“The idea was to keep people outside as much as possible,” Archer said, “so they’re enjoying the gardens. We spent the money on the gardens rather than buildings.”
The 3-acre Global Collection is the star of the show, with zones featuring a mix of time-tested, rare and experimental plants from around the world that were chosen for their suitability to survive in Houston’s hot, humid climate.
Visitors who know even a little bit about plants will quickly recognize this as a place of experiments: Sculptural cacti bask in the sun of an arid rock garden just a few steps away from a misty, mulch-rich tropical landscape. A forest one might see in the highlands of Mexico grows near a grassy, African-inspired savanna and a Mediterranean section with tall palms.
Planting began only a few weeks ago in the raised concrete beds of the culinary garden, which should look much more full by late fall. Its edible and medicinal plants reflect the diversity of Houston’s cuisines and include many specimens that area gardeners can grow at home. A spotlighted water garden area with custom tile fountain walls is still under construction but should be complete by late fall.
The children’s discovery garden had a head start. Mostly completed early this year, it looks more ready for prime time — situated about a five-minute walk from the welcome center, across the bayou channel. Ducks, turtles and other wildlife have already adapted to the boggy areas of the lagoon and its boardwalk maze. Simple water machines and play structures crafted from the property’s felled trees invite dirty nature play at one end of the pond, with an outdoor wash area at the restrooms.
Nancy Thomas can’t wait to see kids playing in the lagoon. “That’s our future,” she said. “If we start with all those young people enjoying the outdoors, we’ve capture them forever.”
Thomas conceived the idea for the Houston Botanic Garden more than 30 years ago with the late Kay Crooker. “It’s something I’ve wanted so long the exact number of years has slipped my mind,” she said.
A former environmental lobbyist and past president of the Garden Club of America, Thomas hosted the early meetings for the first group of about 10 organizers in her Tanglewood home. She had visited botanic gardens around the world and the nation, and she thought her city needed one, too. Even Fort Worth, San Antonio and Dallas had well-established botanic gardens. “We had an arboretum and nature center, but that is not really a botanic garden,” Thomas said.
More to come
She and Crooker advocated for the project through several generations of Houston mayors. The garden finally leased the Glenbrook site from the city in 2015.
Thomas loves it. “It’s an exceptional site, with a nice breeze most of the time; and so well located to serve the city and visitors,” she said.
Organizers have their eyes on the future, with more work ahead. The capital campaign to launch the garden exceeded its goal, finishing last fall at $38.5 million. But the master plan calls for many more projects, including an event and education center, a conservatory with a restaurant, a seasonal garden and a shade garden.
The COVID-19 pandemic and Houston’s sagging energy economy have made fundraising more challenging now, Vassar said. She didn’t lay off staff but delayed new hires and tightened her budget from $2.7 million to about $1.9 million this summer.
This fall’s opening is “a first step,” she said. She does not plan to rush forward.
“We’ll open the gates and pause to see how the public responds to what we have before we launch the next phase, to see which critical elements we want now will still make sense,” she said. “Gardens are ever-changing.”