Houston Botanic Garden — Attraction in Houston

UPDATE 3/12/25 No major changes to discuss. I didn’t see any displays that even warranted a picture. Perhaps it’s still too early in the season. I do notice more urgency from the new CEO so I’m still hopeful changes are coming.

UPDATE 3/29/24 Slowly but surely this garden is maturing! The irises were especially beautiful. I realize there is a 30 year plan, but I wonder if leadership can take steps to enhance the garden in the meantime. Houston’s climate is ideal for gardeners, and it would be great to show off all the different types of vegetation that homeowners could grow in their own yards. How about an Azalea garden? Camellias? Hibiscus? Bougainvillea? Frangipanis? Crinum Lilies? I’d bet many residents would donate free plants from their own gardens. I see so much potential for this garden. Ditch the “tree bridge” concepts and create a garden where people can come to reflect, contemplate, and be inspired. Give us ideas to take home to our own backyards! I like the progress but let’s go faster! Some of us won’t be around in 30 years!

UPDATE 4/15/23 Visit the HBG if you want to feel better about your private home garden. You will find weeds in the beds and uncut grassy areas. It's a very "natural" setting and still a bit underwhelming for the 4th largest city in the country.

UPDATE 9/29/22: I will give the garden credit for making some improvements. The donor names on the bridge are legible again, and most of the flower beds are maintained. I still saw a few beds with weeds and dead plants, which in my opinion should be maintained at all times.

Having said that, the HBG is a beautiful place to take a stroll. It does have loads of potential. I just wish the progress was quicker.

Original Review (July 2022)

I’m not going to pull any punches. I am a member and a donor and I was disappointed with the progress of the garden after almost two years of existence. I can understand the lack of new development but I cannot understand unmaintained plant beds full of obvious weeds and water features malfunctioning. I walked around for over two hours.

Maybe my hopes were set too high because I visited the Fort Worth Botanic Garden in May and was utterly blown away by their rose garden and Japanese gardens. Houston needs to pick up the pace quickly. Yes, I know Fort Worth’s garden is almost 100 years old but we are Houston and we can do big...

I wish I could recommend this place because the pictures, lights and location LOOK like they would be beautiful, unfortunately, because of their parking miscommunications and debacle, we never actually got to see anything.

We booked tickets for myself, my fiancee and our 8 month old for Radiant Nature for 12/22 at 7:00PM and planned to be there 30 minutes early. We arrived and had to wait in line for a right turn to get into the premises for nearly the entire 30 minutes. When we got to the front of the line, we were informed by an extremely rude attendant that the parking lot was for "pre-paid parking only." I showed them our prepaid tickets, and they informed me there was a separate prepayment that had to be made for parking. We were directed to a dingy looking public parking lot several miles away.

We went there to try and park and the line was so long that it would have taken us more than an hour and a half past our scheduled time before we actually got on the shuttle and got to the park.

To confirm I'm not crazy, I went back to the website and their website says multiple conflicting things about parking. On the main page of the website under the FAQ it says on-site parking is free. This is what I saw when I originally checked, so I didn't give it a second thought.

But it turns out that for this specific event, you apparently have to pre-pay for parking. I went through the purchase process again, and it says "Advance purchase is required to park." I thought this was advance purchase of the tickets, which I did online.

But no, to find out actually how to buy this parking in advance, on the CHECK OUT screen, there's a separate section entitled "Park&Ride" (which I wouldn't have thought to click anyway, because I wasn't buying the park and ride, I was buying the on-site parking) which is where you ACTUALLY buy the pre-paid parking ticking for the on-site parking.

We ended up going home without attending the event. Then when I called the next day and asked for a refund, they refused to provide one, doubling down on their confusing website, and terrible customer service.

If you plan to go here, allow at least an hour or more to deal with their backwards, confusing parking situation or just have someone Uber you or something, and if something goes wrong, don't expect customer service of any kind from the rude people...

We went with our baby to this place for the radiant nature light show and we were not happy with our experience for two main reasons: ticket price and parking. First, the ticket price of almost $29 is not worth what you visit, particularly because you need to pay separately for the parking. There are and there have been better light shows in Houston and surrounding areas with more items to visit at a lower price. On the event shuttle that gave us the ride to the Park&Ride parking after return we saw many light scenes shown on the screen that everyone on the shuttle was saying we didn't see this or we didn't see that. Not sure if people who left some good reviews here had visited more items before.

Above all, the worst part comes with the parking experience. I tried to get the onsite parking online before our visit and after several times trying it was not successful, because each time their parking payment system was thinking for a while without turning back any results, even not showing anything as declined, parking full, etc. Anyway we decided to pay for this onsite. But after arriving there we were not allowed to park in the usual parking garage. BTW, this parking is free and first come/first served during normal operation hours per the website. We were told by the staff the parking is full and we need to park in a Park and Ride location 8-10 minutes away driving and then pay $8 to take a shuttle from there to get to the garden location, which we were forced to do. First of all, the parking was not full and had many vacant spots as we walked there and the same spots were still empty after our visit and return. Second, anybody who has a little child knows the difficulty of having your car and what you need on hand to be parked far from where the activities are, but the staff behavior was like it doesn't matter. One bothering phrase being used by the staff was "sorry, it is our policy": my suggestion is you need to change the policies in a way that benefits both you and the people, not just the policy holder. I am usually very hesitant to leave bad reviews, and there is more to explain why I am leaving this review, but I don't want this review to be longer than this. It took me about an hour for all of these before I could enter the garden. If you plan to visit this light show I suggest you find some other...