Ideas by the parkful
Mercer Botanic Gardens spruces up and features Houston-hardy plants
Clara Parra walked along the trails at Mercer Botanic Gardens in her black graduation gown as if the day she gets her diploma were already here.
It’s one of the few “normal” senior-year experiences the 18-year-old has had this year, and she was part of several groups — hikers, first graders and even an expectant mom and dad — walking the park and taking pictures along the way.
Parra’s photographer that day was her sister, 28-yearold Melissa Aguirre, who wanted graduation to be special for Clara — the first in her family to graduate high school.
On a weekday morning, the park was humming with visitors, as it has been throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Though the playgrounds, picnic shelters and drinking fountains have been closed, the park has been open as a place for Houston-area residents to walk outdoors and soak up nature.
Recently, its Creekside Ramble and Storey Lake areas have reopened for the first time since Tax Day flooding in 2016 and subsequent Hurricane Harvey flooding the following year. With their cleanup, repairs and reopening, Mercer Botanic Gardens is fully open for the first time in five years.
The park that began in 1974 with 14 acres donated by Thelma and Charles Mercer has grown to more than 400 acres with the recent acquisition of another 40 acres that will be used for greenhouses and a wet-bottom retention pond.
The site has been known as a place to learn, play and relax along Cypress Creek in Montgomery County and has weathered many storms.
It was damaged in Hurricane Ike in 2008 but bounced back. It suffered significant damage in the 2016 flooding, and just weeks before they were ready to open the Creekside Ramble in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck, filling the gardens with 12 feet or more of floodwater.
When the floodwaters finally receded, the gardens had been devastated, covered in a thick layer of silt. Park employees had to repair damaged buildings, remove the silt, rebuild plant beds and irrigation systems and replace the many trees and plants that died or washed away.
Workers got the main gardens open in 2018, but only now are the final elements, the Creekside Ramble and Storey Lake, open again — and with improvements — in the back portion of the park’s east side.
Before, they were more natural sites that people could wander. Now they’re finished with paving bricks for walkways and more defined plant beds. Storey Lake has a new shelter where you can sit in shade to read, watch the slow-moving turtles and enjoy the blooming crinums and Louisiana irises.
Mercer director Chris Ludwig smiled from afar as program director Jennifer Garrison took pictures of turtles along the water’s edge.
“It feels really good to be back here and see people enjoying it, sitting and reading books,” Ludwig said on a golf-cart tour of the Storey Lake area.
Already popular with engaged couples, wedding parties and quinceañera teens coming in for photo shoots, the place fills up on spring weekends with guys in tuxedos and young women in high heels and sparkly party dresses hoping for pre-prom pictures. The evidence is in the limousines that line the parking lot.
For most people, though, it’s a place to enjoy nature and walk in safety, except for the occasional mosquito.
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts come out to earn badges and contribute to the park. Ludwig said they’ve bought some new “You are here” signs to sprinkle throughout trails, and a troop of Scouts is building and installing the frames they’ll go in. Sometimes they build greenhouse tables, birdhouses or benches, but they always leave feeling like they’ve helped make it a better place.
The February freeze affected Mercer just as it did every park and backyard garden. So a few things died, but most have bounced back. Towering palms and sagos are starting to sprout green fronds at their tops in the tropical garden.
New bamboo shoots are coming up from the ground amid brown, cut-off stalks that are still there merely to help the new grove get established. Rows of Japanese yews are sprouting new growth, too.
The garden’s horticulture staff would have been planting spring color anyway, so that’s not extra work, and rose bushes that line many walkways have never looked better.
One of the biggest benefits of Mercer is the advice to home gardeners, growing by legions during the pandemic. Since the facility plants only the things that are hardy in our zone, people can see what’s doing well in this park and know that it will do well at home. Or they can see annuals, bushes or trees fully grown and know what they’ll look like in their yard.
If they’re still unsure, they can call the garden and talk to horticulturists, who answer questions from the general public every day, Ludwig said.