Sitting to one side of the massive Brackenbridge Park, and tucked into one of San Antonio's more prim neighbourhoods, you'll find the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Brackenbridge may have the wide open spaces, but the Botanical Gardens have something better – the world's plants thriving in climatically-controlled 'capsules'. The award-winning Lucile Halsell Conservatory complex recreates jungles, deserts, mountains and tropical lagoons, in each of its five elegant glass structures.
Inside you'll find plants as diverse as flowering cacti, towering palm trees, rock-clinging mosses and insect-devouring fly traps. Stepping through such varied and different botanical worlds is quite an experience. The conservatories were designed by Emilio Ambasz in 1988, and are as stunning on the outside, as they are on the inside.
The Botanical Gardens were first conceived way back in the 1960s, by two enthusiastic botanists, Mrs Witt and Mrs Joseph Murphy. The site chosen was one of San Antonio's many old quarry workings, transformed into a botanical paradise in the 1980s. Gardens laid out here include the Formal Beds, the Ornamental Grass Garden, a Sacred Garden and Herb Garden. There's even a sensory garden for the visually impaired.
It's not just plants and trees that you'll find here, either. This part of Texas is well-known for its diverse birdlife, so even in the centre of the city, you'll catch glimpses of many of them. That's especially the case in the Gardens' Texas Native Trail, where the designers have recreated three of the typical landscapes you'll find outside of San Antonio.
Along its paths, you'll see the mixed-woods of the Texas Hill Country that lie to the north the thick pines of the East Texas Piney woods and the rolling grasslands of South Texas. Bird watching hides have been set up to help you spot them as they flit around the quieter parts of the gardens. And if all that plant-gazing, bird-watching and trail-walking stokes up an appetite, the historic Sullivan Carriage House has a bistro offering welcome refreshments.
