The San Antonio Botanical Gardens is quite a wonderful place. It is only 38 acres – not a lot for a garden that has the variety that this one does.

The formal gardens are changed seasonally, and include the Old Fashioned Garden, the Rose Garden, the Sensory Garden (which has some wonderful sculptures hiding amongst the various plants), the Japanese Kumamoto En garden, the Sacred Garden, the Shade Garden, Gertie’s Garden, the Cactus and Succulent Garden, and the Children’s Vegetable Garden.  The 5 part conservatory is not only fascinating for it’s contents, but also for it’s architectural design.

11 acres are devoted to the Texas Native Trail – a project which required the importation of a lot of soil as well as plants. The walk through this section takes you through Hill Country (Edwards Plateau), East Texas Pineywoods, and South Texas ecosystems .

I could talk a lot about the Gardens, but that would involve regurgitating information that is on the website, (see the link above), and show some of the several dozen pictures I took of flowers, but they really don’t do service to the whole of the display. It is designed to be experienced, and that is what I did.

But what was really special about our visit was the Lego® installation, created by artist Sean Kenney. The sculptures were placed around the entire park, so that looking at these didn’t detract from seeing the gardens themselves, or visa versa. It ran from September 6th to January 4th, so the timing of our visit was perfect.

So here are pictures of the Lego® sculptures. (The butterfly has a 5-foot wingspan, the bee is 4 feet long and the rose is 7 foot tall. The lawnmower and garden worker are life-size.)