Zilker Botanical Garden

We ventured out to the Zilker Botanical Garden down near Zilker Park, home to the ACL Music Festival and a hard-to-follow disc golf course among other things. This is the first of three posts about our time at the sprawling garden area.

Now it is winter around here, which means that many of the beautiful plants in the Botanical Garden proper weren't blooming. This lead me to focus on some of the historical structures that have been transplanted to the Garden.

This first house is a Swedish immigrant's home. Swedes cam in startling numbers to central Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Well, startling may be an exaggeration, but the number is up just under twenty thousand, and that startled me.



This next structure is an old school house that was transplanted from today's intersection of Spicewood Springs and Mopac, a fact I include because I've driven that intersection many times. Inside you can see the three pew-like benches that would have housed homesteader kids and the like.



This is an old Swedish blacksmith building, complete with authentic tools inside and a backyard (not pictured) littered with rusted farming type machinery.



Here Corrie sits in the transplanted Butler Window. An Irishman named Butler made a fortune in Austin and built a great mansion. After his death it was turned briefly into an antique dealer's shop, and then it was dismantled and parsed out. This large window was planted here at the Garden overlooking the Rose Garden and Walk. At this time of year that view is less than spectacular.



Again we see Corrie, but here she poses in the Composting Garden Display. All around her are various containers showcasing the different methods of composting. Since we were successful composters, we were knowledgeably impressed.