Texas Hill Country Part II: Wildflower Center

After we left the capitol in downtown Austin, we stopped at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center. Lady Bird Johnson, who was the wife of the 36th president of the United States, co-founded the Wildflower Research Center to protect and preserve the nation's native plants. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were from Texas Hill Country, and we'll have more about them in our next couple of posts. In the meantime, here is Margery at the entrance to the Wildflower Center.

The Wildlife Center has various demonstration gardens, display gardens, theme gardens and meadows. They also feature rotating shows of flower-related artwork displayed indoors as well as numerous pieces of outdoor sculpture like this gazelle right at the garden entrance.

We were somewhat unnerved by this pair of 10 to 12 foot ants since we are battling an ant infestation in our motor home right now. Fortunately, our latest selection of ant bait (Combat Liquid Ant Bait) is working, and we seem to be winning the fight.

 

The Wildflower Center has an observation tower where we could get an overview of some of the gardens.

You can see the white horns of a sculpture of a longhorn steer near the center of the photo above. Paul couldn't resist posing for a photo beside the sculpture because he liked the way it was made from tools such as rasps, gears, files and wrenches.

From the tower, we couldn't see very many flowers blooming. Although the Wildflower Center's web site said a cool spring has held many of the flowers back, it looked like the blue bonnets were past their peak. There were, however, some colorful beds in the informal garden.

There were also some cacti in flower.

There is a section of the garden devoted to raised-bed wildflower gardening. Galvanized livestock troughs are used as containers.

We walked a short loop around one of the meadows. Although there were no massive displays of wildflowers, there were some blooms here and there like those in the next photo. Clockwise from the upper left: square-bud primrose, Indian blanket, antelope horns, and Indian paintbrush.

We had hoped our timing would have been better than it was and that we would have seen more showy displays of wildflowers at Wildflower Center. However, we did learn a little more about wildflowers and we did learn some of their names.

We have lots more sightseeing planned for Hill Country, so look for more posts.

Comments

[Jim & Cathy Palm]

I'm sure it's on your list if you haven't been there before but the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin is a very interesting and informative place to spend a few hours, even if you didn't vote for him. Also is Birth place and ranch make an interesting day.
Your blog's are making me miss Texas.