Jigsaw flowers

With out-of-town visitors in April, our Botanical Gardens was a must-see. Especially because this really cool exhibition of not-real-but-really-gorgeous fauna was on display. (I was a very bad blogger and neglected to get a picture of the exhibition title and the artist's name; and the SABG website apparently doesn't archive past exhibitions. Yet another reason to keep blogging up to date. Sorry!)

The area was just swarming with these lovely creations and we all enjoyed them immensely. Here are some more:

pretty pink tree at the entrance to the Garden's fern grotto

here'a a closer look at this one

The sculptures I've shown you so far are stationary, but one of them moved...and in a fantastic way!

Here's another shot, with Adorable Grandson in for scale and context:

So cool! If our summer-that-doesn't-seem-to-want-to-end ever does that, and we get some cooler weather, I'll head back to the Garden and see what's on display for fall!

A Walk in the Park

One of the true jewels of our city is Brackenridge Park, located near the headwaters of the San Antonio River (of course, another jewel) and also near my house.

One morning early this year—yes, I'm up to 2026 in my catching-up-blogging-adventure!—we learned a lot about its history, which, naturally, made us appreciate it all the more. The Brackenridge Park Conservancy put on a free history walk that was a real eye-opener. (This a group I've been associated with the last few years as the Tuesday Musical Club's representative on their stakeholders committee.) You can take a virtual version of the walk, and learn more about the structures I'll show you on this page in the Conservancy's website.

The walk took us to a corner of the Park that I wasn't too familiar with, on the far north side. One of the landmarks here is an old bridge, crowned with this impressive ironwork:

An even more spectacular structure is the Joske Pavilion, built in 1926.

Isn't the stonework on this place both beautiful and wonderfully random and disordered?! Here's a closeup of part of the outside:

Another set of structures on this side of the park was a bathhouse, used back in the day when you could swim in the river. This area's been turned into a kind of maze/playground (which the Adorable Grandchildren enjoyed exploring on a later visit).

And, finally, crowning the walk, was this fauxbois masterpiece:

I've written about these quirky sculptures before; there are several along the river downstream of the park, as well as just scattered about the town, serving as bus stops, benches, and whatnot. But this walkway, seen from below in the photo just above, was really beyond any of its siblings.

Here's how it looks from street level, on approach...

...and here's what it looks like as you start to walk through it:

So very cool! We learned more about the artist, Dionicio Rodriguez, and how he worked this concrete magic. All in all, a very nice way to spend an alarmingly warm February day.

'Round about town

 

After our trip to New England last fall, there weren't any major excursions on our agenda, but we did some stuff around town. Like go to a tailgate at sunset before an SAFC soccer game. Henry even took his camping firepit for grilling:

There were also "No Kings" marches, with lots of imaginative protest signs and costuming...

Then, in November, we were invited to a friend's party on the river walk. It was pretty cool to see everything lit up along our river at night. Especially from the nice vantage point on the second floor of the club where the party was:

The water taxi boats looked especially fancy...

...as did some of the party attendees...

Catching up

Yes, I know I've been *very* remiss about blogging lately. I think I was somewhat burned out from the massive blog-a-rama that followed our trip to the UK last year. After putting in a few posts later, when I went somewhere interesting (Santa Fe, Colorado, Maine), but then I just ran out of steam.

So, as a spur to myself, I decided to finally respond to Google's occasional "You're almost out of storage!!!" notices and subscribe to a larger chunk of The Cloud. So now I have no excuse but to fill that up with photos and text, I guess!

Another advantage is that I get to go back thru the photo gallery and remember some of the less-than-spectacular junkets that have happened over the last year. To keep things straight for myself, I'm starting with July, 2025...

...when Henry and I went on a walk I'd never been on before, back up and behind the Japanese Tea Garden you can see above. I've shown you pictures from it before, but not from this vantage! Looks pretty amazing, does it not?

The trail we took goes behind the Sunken Garden Theatre...

...where we actually attended a concert some time ago, courtesy of the Brackenridge Park folks. It's a pretty neat place to catch a show. Here's a better view of the seating area:

Note the somewhat hazy view of part of downtown (the Hemisfair Tower, which we ascended during a visit from grandkids a couple of years back, is a dead giveaway) in the background here. This trail gives you some pretty nice viewpoints!

The whole jaunt was Henry's idea, so I thought it only fitting he should appear in the post:

I hope to be able to get back in the blogging habit and show you some other round-about-town sights in the coming weeks. Wish me luck!

Wordless Wednesday: from the Tower

 

Downstream

A while ago I showed you the stretch of the San Pedro Creek Culture Park upstream from the Texas Public Radio headquarters. I recently, finally, I made the time to take a look at the (shorter) section downstream.

Here's what the handsome TPR building looks like from the downstream side:

That's a fine landmark to keep you oriented, but it's not the only impressive edifice along this walk...

downtown University of Texas at San Antonio

I had not seen this latest addition to what's become a sprawling downtown campus. Many years ago, when our fair city was granted a UT branch, there was talk of locating it downtown. But for various reasons (probably including local politics) it was planted on the far north side of town. Where, to be fair, it has prospered (almost 35,000 students currently). Twenty or so years later, the university opened a small downtown campus which has also grown like gangbusters, transforming at least a small part of the near west side. The creekside building you see above houses their data sciences department.

I wasn't able to go all the way down to the end of the Park's development, as it started to sprinkle and heavy rain was forecast. I'll try to complete my tour at a future date, but here's a glimpse from where I stopped and turned around:

note the egret primping itself, in the red box

But I did get to see a lot of the beautiful tile art and mosaic murals along the creek. The mural at the top of the post is the culmination of a series of scenes highlighting SA history. Here are a couple more:

I love the way this one is reflecting in the calm water

In addition to these narrative murals, there are more abstract displays, like this one right behind the TPR building...

And if you noticed the tilework along the steps, well, of course, I did, too!

Here's another sample of the lovely tilework that adorns the creekside. I'm so impressed with how attractive our city has made this former ditch!

Wordless Wednesday: what a handsome house...

 

Art Underfoot

You find the most amazing things when you decide to walk just one more block than you planned!

The other day after a doctor's appointment I decided to take a quick walk around the little park that's next to the medical building before heading back to my car. I hadn't really noticed before that the park actually extends another block. And in the middle of this bonus block is this gazebo...

(I also didn't know that the park has a name—Crockett Park—handily provided by a quick google search. It actually has a pretty interesting history, as you can see if you follow the link above, which is to a waymarking site, I assume for the use of geocachers).

But what really blew me away, and made this little detour worth blogging about, is—wait for it!—floor art! Or, actually ground art, but still so cool!

Readers who managed to wade through all my European posts will remember that I got a little batty over there about floor tile art in churches and museums (the floor of the Duomo in Siena was the highlight). Who knew that there was some waiting for me right out in this little park a few miles from my house!

The bluebonnet at the top of the post is one of three lovely flower mosaics that surround the gazebo. Here are the others...

Aren't they pretty?! And especially since they were completely unexpected.

What drew me over to the second block of the park was this extremely handsome structure...

Formerly a hotel and today an apartment house, it's called the Aurora and I'd love to go inside it someday and see what I hope is still the original art deco interior. But wouldn't it be great to have one of those stone balconies outside your window!

It's a great little park, but severely underused, I suppose because of the lack of free parking around it. I'm just glad I found it.

Changed circumstances and new discoveries

It will take a somewhat round-about story to explain the pictures in today's blog post, photos of a lovely gem that I—rather shamefacedly—only recently discovered.

The Library branch I normally patronize—that provides me with tangible books and DVDs practically at the snap of my fingers—is just a few blocks from my house, walking distance even in the summer heat. Plus it has a great playground that is very popular with permanent residents of the neighborhood as well as visitors from New England. [Note: When looking for previous posts about this Library and its grounds, I just realized that I haven't done any! geeez! that will have to be remedied this fall!]

Anyway, they are renovating this lovely old building over the summer, and while its playground and the convenient bookdrop are still open, I can't get inside to pick up my requested volumes. So I've pressed the next closest branch into service...

It's not too much further away, but definitely not summer-walking distance. However, it's part of a large complex of public areas, some of which I'll be showing you below.

One of them is here, the San Pedro Playhouse (which happened to be the setting for our local march in support of science).

Since there aren't a lot of plays going on during the week, when I usually need to visit the Library, and since it's just far enough away to provide a summer-appropriate amount of exercise, I've started parking at the Playhouse and walking over to the Library.

And in the process, I've discovered the absolute jewel that is San Pedro Springs Park. Wow! I can't believe this lovely, and historically significant, campus was a surprise to me! Some Hometown Tourist I am!

The first thing that you see heading south from the Playhouse parking lot is this amazing aquamarine shimmer, through the trees...

It's an enormous, and gorgeous pool that has seemed, at least when I've been walking by, to be seriously underutilized. Here's a look from pool level:

Astute readers will also notice another big plus for the area: fabulous trees. The ones on the right above keep a good chunk of the pool shaded, which is nice when it's really hot and sunny. And here's a real behemoth just a few yards away...

Another eye-catching feature is the gazebo, providing yet more welcome shade. Here's what it looks like from the down at pool level...

...and here's what the pool looks like from under the gazebo's handsome roof...

But the most surprising sight on my walk is this...

It's actually not one of the eponymous springs, as I originally thought, but a Victorian-era "grotto" constructed at one point during this site's long, long history of bringing cool relief to denizens of the region.

This website about our local aquifer will give you more information about the springs themselves than you probably want, but the historical marker at the site sums it up rather impressively...

Yes, that does say the park was established in 1729, making it the second-oldest public park in the U.S., after Boston Common. The springs were named even earlier, in 1709.

This handy slideshow provided by our local paper will show you scenes of the park during a good part of its illustrious history. 

Although it doesn't solve the mystery of this small building in the Library's back yard...

Apparently the experts can't decide if it was part of a colonial structure, a warehouse, or a feature in an Victorian amusement park that occupied the site in the mid-1800's. You can read more about the various theories here, also courtesy of the San Antonio Express-News.

Mysteries or no, discovering this gem of an attraction, not three miles from my house, was both a humbling and an exhilerating experience. I think that we San Antonians, being rather more awash in historically significant sites than residents of most major cities, tend to take that for granted sometime!