Part One
There are times I’m stuck in the city between appointments with a few hours to
kill. I’m always looking for a comforting spot, a place where I can drink too
much coffee or loiter around some books or stare into space undisturbed.
A home away from home. One such place, although not officially within the
city, is the Wildflower Research Center, a restful spot whose clinical-sounding
name belies its true nature.
If you like your home to yourself, now’s the time to visit. On a warm winter
day, you can munch pastries all alone on the patio of Texas French Bread
(located at the Center) without worrying who you’ll offend with the shower of
cookie crumbs spraying from your mouth. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-4pm, you
can peruse the 1,500 titles in the research library, including such notable
tomes as The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by
Insects by Charles Darwin or Soils and Men: the Yearbook of Agriculture
1938. There are books listing the endangered plants of the Trans-Pecos and
books describing poisonous and medicinal plants, landscape tutorials and pretty
picture books.
Even without the glorious color that spring wildflowers will hopefully
provide, it’s still fun to stroll past the demonstration gardens: the
conventional water-sucking-carpet-grass-canna-lirope design, the formal Texas
native patch, and the more naturalized native plan. The center is studying the
comparative costs — in time, money, and water — of each garden design.
If you must get a wildflower fix off-season, hit the gift shop where every
imaginable gewgaw, from umbrellas to note cards, ceramic tiles to T-shirts,
tote bags to dinner ware, are bedecked with bluebonnets and phlox and the
like.
Press your envious nose against the glass of one of their stunning
greenhouses. Trace the path of rainwater (if it ever falls again) along the
aqueducts and through the mondo gutters in what is billed as “North America’s
largest rooftop rainwater collection system.” Submit to the trance-inducing
bubbles of the fabricated spring in the middle of the courtyard. Climb the
45-foot observation tower and pretend you are lord or mistress of all you
survey.
The Wildflower Research Center is on La Crosse Boulevard, off Loop 1 South,
open Tue-Sun 9am-5:30pm, 292-4100.
This article appears in February 23 • 1996 and February 23 • 1996 (Cover).