San Antonio Botanical Garden Report: Treehouses...

If you happened to pick up the San Antonio Express-News for Saturday the 30th of August, you may have seen the brief article on the opening of the Terrific Tree houses exhibit at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Well, just so happens that on Friday, my wife and I made a trip to Funston off Broadway, to see the exhibit for ourselves, but without the ruffles and flourishes required of an opening.

Let me cut quickly to the chase on two important items: First, my wife has been trying to get me to go to SABG for years and each time, I simply have balked at the idea because I figured it involved more goofy flowers than an HEB on Valentines Day, and second, I took more pictures in the hour or two that we wandered through this place than I have in any single location we have written about since starting this blog.

So to answer my first complaint, it isn't all goofy flowers. This is a place that you can go to enjoy a relaxing walk, get some incredible ideas for your own landscaping at home, and enjoy some nice art.

And on the issue of taking lots of pictures, I couldn't possibly narrate our entire visit through the park, but if you'd like to see the pictures I took (either to avoid the entrance fee, or just to check it out before you actually go), I offer you a rare glimpse of my Flickr page. Have at it.

I'm only going to hit the high points and I'll let you explore this beautiful place on your own. So, a few administrative items are in order. First, the adult admission is well worth the $7.00 but if you are military, a senior citizen or any number of other qualifying census data markers, you can get a discount. I paid $5.00, my wife had to pay $7.00. Ha Ha!

Also, we hit it on a weekday and the sky was overcast. I would bet that if you visited during a period of heavy traffic like during a school field trip, it would be noisy, and in the heat of the day, it would really suck. Enjoy the pictures.When you enter through the Sullivan Carriage House, you will see a nice gift shop and restaurant. My daughter ad her husband have dined at the Carriage House and really enjoyed it, though pricey to them, but we skipped it for a later lunch treat.Once we entered the actual gardens, it was as if being transformed from the hustle and bustle of San Antonio and the harsh Alamo Heights traffic into a really peaceful, well, Botanical Garden. Okay, to be honest, at first I was underwhelmed. We went off into the Rose Garden. Coincidentally, I've been working in my own rose garden at the house, and though this place was 1,000 times better than mine, hell, at least my landscape timbers are in better shape. But it gets better.I really enjoyed the Fountain Plaza, though I was unable to get a good photo of it due to the extraneous people and pop-up canopies in place preparing for the opening on Saturday.We went in to the Japanese Garden and that was a real treat. I loved the rocks, the streams and the path. Oh, and stay off the grass!From there, we moved on to the Lucile Halsell Conservatory where there are several different pavillions containing different types of plants. If you have ever driven by the area and have seen the tall glass structures, this is where the plants are.In addition to the plants and trees and ferns and cacti, the entire SABG has various artistic designs and sculptures and such incorporated into the gardens. You don't have to do a school report on it after the fact, so go ahead and enjoy the beauty without all the associated anxiety of trying to guess what it means.I did really enjoy the fern grotto because the day was beginning to warm up and inside, the combination of the waterfall and some strategically placed fans and air vents, it was a cool respite from the humidity that was building up.I suppose each of the little enclosed areas is some sort of different gardening experiment. They control the climate inside to allow them to focus on different areas so you can go from a desert environment to a tropical garden from one building to the next. It really is enjoyable to see. And it isn't just rows and rows of plants like walking through a nursery; the gardens themselves are art.Atop a hill overlooking a beautiful lawn (I guess this is where they hold concerts), is an interesting structure. At times the place looks like a golf course, and at other times, you feel like you are in a Disney park with the really nice detail of landscaping and water features.And at the top of this Overlook, you can see the San Antonio skyline several miles away. It's interesting that, until I got to the top and saw beyond the boundaries of the gardens, I had completely lost myself in the place. You don't hear traffic and since we went a a day where no school field trips were in progress, we really didn't hear much of anything aside from birds and the occasional buzzing bee.Speaking of field trips and kids, we did walk by the Children's Vegetable Garden which is a program to teach kids how to, well, grow veggies. They apparently give each kid some plants, they farm them and then maybe later they eat them. Sounds like a hoot.In spite of all the beautiful flowers and plants and sculptures and things, my favorite place in the entire gardens was the East Texas Pineywoods setting surrounding a nice sized pond. The path is not made of cement or stepping stones, but instead it is the natuarl pine needles that cover the trail. And the pond is a thing of beauty, so quiet and really, calming. If I was a homeless guy, I'd sell some blood, pay my way into this place and just hang out here all day long. It really is incredible.If it wasn't just wonderful enough, we seemed to become the interest of this little herd of woodducklings, no doubt assuming we had a quarter's worth of feed from a dispenser on the other side of the pond.

Oh, I guess you'd like to see the treehouses. And this is the thing; the tree houses aren't exactly in trees - in fact a few of them weren't anywhere near trees. I guess they did this as a safety thing, because afterall, what kid on a field trip could resist climbing into a tree house so as to smoke a few cigarettes or take a quick hit from his pocket flask, and then all hell would break loose.This one was really nice, called Inspirational Treehouse. I could see this in my back yard. Unitl it got windy.This one is called The Windcatcher. It seems to be made of PVC pipe hanging from the tree with little windmills attached to the pipes. They say that if you were to sit inside, you would here a nice humming sound from the breeze. I also get that at my house everytime I'm working in the yard and the Air Conditioner turns on. But this is prettier.This was my wife's favorite. The Re-Born treehouse is made of recycled materials. Of all the displays, this is the treehouse you would want if you were a kid.The Greek Revival Sandbox. Okay. Imagine the tree.Our Green Treehouse has a solar panel on the top of it. How green. I'm sure kids are cutting in line to hang out here.This one is called Bamboo Pavilion. And you can use it to change your clothes.

There were a few more treehouses on display that either didn't catch my fancy or they looked more like sculptures than treehouses that I didn't realize they were part of the show. Likewise, there are several other areas in the gardens, but in the interest of time I'm skipping over, but you can check out the pictures page or better yet, visit SABG for yourself. It really was a great time.