We finally made it back to one of my favorite places, the Houston Botanic Garden. It felt like a favorite place even before it came into existence. It took 18 years for an idea to become reality – an abandoned golf course reimagined, repurposed, revitalized into “132 acres of horticultural displays, natural ecosystems, and walking trails.” It is both wild and tamed, educational and exploratory, playful and serious about its mission to “enrich life through discovery, education, and the conservation of plants and the natural environment.” The husband gifted me a membership the month it opened and that has become my perennial, favorite birthday present.
I love the family garden section. To get there, you cross a high pedestrian bridge over Sims Bayou where you can look up to see the planes flying into and out of Hobby airport, or follow the bayou to the towers of the petrochemical plants on the Houston Ship Channel, but you still feel removed from the city. Once across the bridge, you walk thru a tree “gallery” of sorts to a pond bordered on one side by a rainbow garden and on one end by a kid-powered water feature playground. And currently, the family garden is home to a display of lego sculptures.
It’s all about the details. The sundial was, of course, positioned correctly for time-telling and the “seed” in the bird feeder was also lego bricks.
All of the garden is evolving and growing. I say this because it is still fairly new, in its third year now. But I also think that it is designed to change, as a living organism will. It always looks different to me, in part because I visit at different times of year, but also because I go infrequently enough to always have something different catch my eye (or maybe I just forget whatever I might have learned previously.)
This trip I noticed a banana plant flower for the first time.
We have a few varieties of ginger in our yard, but now I want some of these, too.
One to two hours always seems to be the right amount of time at the garden, no matter how much of the total space I actually explore. We capped off our trip this week with lunch at a small, family-run Vietnamese restaurant and checked out another branch of the Houston Public Library system.
Although the husband and I promised ourselves we’d explore new places and spaces in Houston now that he’s retired, some of the old places are well worth revisiting.
Thoughts from the back 