Peckerwood Garden: Taking Root II

Peckerwood Garden hosted its second annual Taking Root Luncheon on October 15 in a packed room in Houston. The keynote speaker was Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape architect for the new Drawing Institute of the Menil Collection in Houston, which broke ground in March. Van Valkenburgh talked about a few of his many projects including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. He told the audience that he visited Peckerwood before starting work at the Menil Collection and that visit inspired them to create “a subtle land in a hot place.”

Peckerwood Garden, located in Hempstead, Texas, has been a preservation partner garden of the Garden Conservancy since 1998. Most recently, we assisted Peckerwood Garden by providing a grant for a tree documentation project, facilitating the hiring of a professional to design a database and a part-time employee to work with the garden creator, John Fairey, to gather and organize data, and to map locations of the specimens.