My New Favorite City Feature
December 11th, 2018
I have a new favorite feature of any city I’ve seen anywhere – the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas.
The Riverwalk is a striking feature of San Antonio — my favorite cityscape anywhere.
This lushly landscaped blend of water, food, shops, and park winds 2½ miles along the San Antonio River in the heart of Texas’s second largest city.
San Antonio’s Riverwalk is the model for walks like this, which many cities have copied for good reason. It’s not only an early one (its roots date to a 1921 flood), but its plantings really make it special.
The stars are the nearly century-old bald cypress trees that line both river sides and grow into a steepled canopy above the narrow, shallow water.
Bald cypresses fall into a rare class of plants known as deciduous conifers – cone-bearing, needled plants that turn color in fall and drop their foliage each year like a maple or dogwood. That fakes out a lot of people who think their “evergreens” have died.
Despite its southern location, San Antonio does have fall foliage. It’s not as broad and striking as ours, but there IS fall color in Texas.
It comes about a month later than our fall-foliage show, which means those Riverwalk bald cypresses were in prime burnt-gold mode for the garden tour that Lowee’s Group Tours and I ran at the end of November.
See my photo gallery of pictures from the November 2018 San Antonio tour.
San Antonio offered more than the Riverwalk and the Alamo – its most famous attraction. (The Alamo could use some landscaping… it’s pretty bare out front!)
The five-glasshouse Halsell Conservatory is the best feature of San Antonio Botanical Garden.
For gardeners, there’s the 38-acre San Antonio Botanical Garden, a fairly new (1980) collection of display gardens, glasshouses, and trails.
The Lucille Halsell Conservatory is the highlight there. It’s actually a five-glasshouse futuristic conservatory village with a courtyard and pond in the middle.
Each house features a different setting of tender plants, including desert plants, a foggy fern grotto, tropical plants, and a palm and cycad house.
The 2½-acre Adventure Garden is also a strong suit at SABG. Kids can play in cactus-roofed little huts, wind their way through a muhly-grass maze, and walk down “Thunder Ridge,” a long, rocky canyon that sometimes channels water to mimic a Texas thunderstorm.
SABG also shows different water-saving demo home gardens, grows a couple dozen raised beds of edibles, and shows off more than 250 species of Texas native plants in its 11 acres of wooded trails.
This grassy path leads into the Luci and Ian Family Garden at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Native plants are the sole focus of the 284-acre Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, located less than 90 minutes from San Antonio on the outskirts of Austin.
Lady Bird was President Lyndon Johnson’s first lady in the 1960s. She was way ahead of her time in trumpeting the value of native plants and our natural surroundings.
She and actress Helen Hayes started what was originally called the National Wildflower Research Center in 1982 to draw attention to Texas’s native plant beauty.
Now, the Wildflower Center displays some 800 Texas native plants in nine acres of display gardens, plus 16 more acres of arboretum.
Run by the University of Texas, the Center is Texas’s official state botanical garden and arboretum.
Besides the native plants and native-stone structures and water features, the latest addition is the Luci and Ian Family Garden. This is a 4½-acre kids playland with water, exploration areas, and tunnels that kids can scoot through.
Luci is LBJ and Lady Bird’s youngest daughter who donated $1 million with her husband, Ian Turpin, to help build the family garden in 2014.
If you’re a native-plant fan, check out the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s website, which has the country’s biggest data base of American native plants.
San Antonio’s Japanese Tea Garden, as seen from the viewing platform above.
A third central-Texas garden well worth seeing is the San Antonio Japanese Tea Garden. This one dates to 1917-1919 when the city decided to build a sunken garden in what was a former and donated limestone quarry.
Using jail laborers, the city collected native stone from the site to build bridges, paths, and terraces through and around the big hole in the ground.
The result is a beautiful view out over the layout of ponds, island gardens, and lush perimeter plantings. You’d never expect a Japanese garden in the heart of Texas, but it’s there and nicely done. And it’s free.
A curiosity about this garden – it was repurposed as the San Antonio Chinese Tea Garden during and after World War II, when America suddenly despised all things Japanese.
It returned to being the Japanese Tea Garden in the 1980s, although the garden’s entry arch still shows it as the Chinese Tea Garden.
Some of Confluence Park’s landscape.
Also in San Antonio is a new Confluence Park, which is an effort to both beautify and protect about one mile of where the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek merge.
The city is attempting to restore the ecosystem by planting a landscape of grasses, trees, and native plantings. Besides improving flood protection and reducing erosion, the park has become a haven for pollinators as well as nature-hungry city dwellers.
One last gardening stop we made was to the Wildseed Farms near Fredericksburg, Texas – the German-heritage section of Texas’s Hill Country.
Wildseed is America’s biggest family-owned wildflower operation, spanning 200 acres of fields and demo gardens.
This place must be gorgeous in summer. But since that part of Texas got a hard frost in early November this year, everything was yanked and gone from the fields by the time we got there.
There’s also a good-sized butterfly garden and a large water feature.
Even in the off-season, though, Wildseed Farm is a destination garden center selling Texas foods, Texas wines, and assorted regional mixes of wildflower seeds.
See pictures of these gardens in George’s San Antonio photo gallery.