Houston’s historical timeline is typically highlighted with the Allen brothers’ founding of the city in 1836, oil booms and busts, NASA and the rise of a glitzy skyline that sparkles over once-muddy streets.
A new exhibit will take a different path to connect past and present with a look at private and public gardens.
“Gardens always reflect the time,” says architect Kathleen English, whose idea sparked “Garden Architecture: Design and Placemaking in the Bayou City,” at Architecture Center Houston. The exhibit, which opens with a reception 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, will include images and stories of historical gardens, a juried presentation of recent public and private garden design and a McDugald Steele-designed vignette.
“The purpose of the exhibit is to celebrate gardens in and of themselves, not just as enhancements to buildings, but to make place,” she says.
An obvious milestone is the 14-acre formal and informal woodlands at Bayou Bend, the Latin Colonial home of the late philanthropist and garden visionary Ima Hogg. The now-public Southern garden showcases native and adapted plants such as azaleas, camellias and crape myrtles, as well as elegant design, which exemplifies the country house movement popular in late-19th and early-20th-century America. Take away the house at Bayou Bend, and the garden stands as a beautiful example of place-making, English says.
“Bayou Bend is Houston’s defining landscape. Yet Houston has much deeper history of gardens, much more compelling than people may realize. I’m excited the exhibit will bring breadth, visually, and look at how things have changed.”
Yes, Houstonians are still swatting mosquitoes and battling weather extremes. But gardens have come a long way since early travelers first admired the magnolias, oaks, sycamores and other native flora along Buffalo Bayou and the wildflower-bejeweled grasslands of the coastal prairies.
To grasp the first 100 years of that story, exhibit committee members Barry Moore, Jim Patterson, Lynn Herbert and Robyn Franklin plumbed multiple sources, including the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.
Growing food to put on the table was the primary focus after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, says Moore, an architect.
While home-grown vegetables and fruits were still a necessity in 1845, ornamentals began to appear in the new town’s gardens. Paperwhites bloomed along the front picket fence at the Thomas William House Sr. residence at Smith and Capitol. By the time Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted visited in 1854, oranges, peaches, figs, bananas, oleanders and lantana were among the non-natives growing in local gardens.
As in other parts of the country, ornamental gardening ramped up during the plant-crazed Victorian era, and people of means decorated with trees, shrubs and showy blooms. New city utilities were the end of privies and woodpiles, which allowed more space for geometrically shaped beds of colorful blooms and foliage. By 1890, Houston’s premiere mansions and gardens lined Main Street between Capitol and Calhoun, Moore notes.
English immigrant Alfred J. Whitaker and other early nurserymen helped supply enthusiastic gardeners’ demands. Saburo Arai’s Japanese nursery stocked native plants and imports such as azaleas, camellias and waxleaf ligustrum, a handsome evergreen maligned today.
None were more influential than nurseryman Edward Teas, who landscaped the Rice Institute in 1911 and planted the magnificent live oaks that canopy Main Street today.
While researching the exhibit, Moore discovered three major ideas influencing home garden design at the turn of the century: house and garden integrated for living, a particular style for both and the suggestion of country living. A prime example: Inglenook, Henry Kirby’s place at Smith and Gray, and Houston’s first professionally designed, fashionably Italian-influenced private garden.
While Houston grew, and private gardens became more diverse, public green spaces came on the scene with Whitaker’s 1871 vow to create a rural cemetery park. Glenwood Cemetery became Houston’s first professionally designed public space – a scenic, wooded site meant not only for paying respects but also for picnicking and enjoying nature.
By 1900, Houstonians were using the bandstand, pavilion and arbor, and playground in Sam Houston Park, the city’s first public park. The downtown space remains a popular site for festivals and concerts.
By 1914, Houston had its beloved Hermann Park. This year’s 100th-anniversary celebration includes the opening of McGovern Centennial Gardens, 15 acres of diverse landscapes.
“The gardens have elements that link directly to history, such as the formal allée, but it is distinctly contemporary,” says Doug Hoerr of Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, the firm that designed the new garden. White Oak Studio collaborated on the project.
“Public parks performed such a different function 100 years ago from what they do today, partly because the concept of gardening has changed so much. Then, it was mostly the wealthy who could afford gardens, and the public park was where people went to see exuberant flowering displays, enjoy social time walking the promenade and get away from the density of the city.
“The design of the Centennial Gardens was driven by that fact – it is designed to be a place where people can see new ideas, learn about how to use plants and adapt that knowledge to their own gardens.”
As the city’s density increases, and private spaces are squeezed into smaller plots, public green areas are on the rise again.
Buffalo Bayou Park, a 2.3-mile stretch of green belt between Shepherd and Sabine, is being transformed into a gem, not only with more amenities for users, but also with an emphasis on restoring and preserving landscapes that were altered during the years.
Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, in the southwest corner of Memorial Park, anticipates a new master-planned look after the 2011 drought.
Today, Houston is bursting with garden clubs, plant societies and nurseries that share the tools and know-how to again grow food at home, plant wildlife habitats and try the latest cultivars.Imaginative individual gardens thrive, new place-makers in a sprawling city landscape.
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