A visit to Myriad Botanical Gardens and Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory, Oklahoma City

I recently visited Oklahoma City and had a Sunday to kill. Being within walking distance from my hotel I decided to visit the Myriad Botanical Gardens and Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory.

The garden functions as an urban oasis in downtown Oklahoma City with its verdant hills, perennial gardens, and a tranquil lake with koi and lots of turtles sunning themselves. The cylindrical glass shape of the Crystal Bridge Conservatory is hovering above the waters of the lake connecting its shores - a novel and interesting approach to greenhouse construction.


Crystal Bridge Conservatory

While the garden itself and the special architecture of the conservatory merit a visit I was a bit disappointed with the collection of plants kept in the conservatory. The succulent collection (growing on the so-called Dry Mountain) seems like a mishmash of unrelated and mostly unnamed plants (one of the named exceptions being a large Astrophytum ornatum (Monk's Hood)), but I'm probably heavily prejudiced by my expectations to botanical gardens as collections of plants with a scientific scope - not just a look-and-feel-good assemblage of greenery.


Astrophytum ornatum – one of the few named plants


View of the Dry Mountain

Writing this I realized that I've been consistently complaining about the quality of the cactus collections in my posts on botanical gardens – I guess I'll have to arrange a visit to the Desert Botanical Garden (Phoenix, Arizona) in order to see some real plants ;-)