Walk Through the Houston Botanic Garden

See how a new Texas garden welcomes spring 

After opening last September, the Houston Botanic Garden was gearing up for its first spring when February’s winter storms swept across Texas, freezing and damaging roughly eighty percent of the flora across the property’s 132 acres. But nature is resilient, and the HBG staff is innovative; they expect much of the garden to bud again this spring—in fact, many plants have already begun to resprout. The themed gardens that make up the property’s swath of former golf course illustrate how plants connect Houston to the rest of the world. “We have cacti, succulents, banana plants, elephant ears, spider lilies, different palms,” says Brent Moon, the garden’s horticulture manager. “You feel like you’re transported to different regions of the world, but these are all plants that do well here.” Nearby, the coastal prairie and stormwater wetlands collections teach about conservation while the culinary garden, which nods to kitchen gardens from the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa, and Central America, yields olives, beans, corn, and herbs.