on the trail

Celebrate spring's arrival at these 2 Houston garden tours

The Azalea Trail, one of Houston’s most enduring seasonal traditions, returns this weekend. Once an annual event, the now biennial tour is a do-not-miss affair offering the opportunity for Houstonians to experience some of the best gardens and architecture the city has to offer — all before the Bayou City gets too balmy. Additionally, the newly opened Ismaili Center will offer complimentary tours of their nine acres of gardens in conjunction with the Azalea Trail.

Now in its 88th year, the River Oaks Garden Club’s Azalea Trail has long served as something of Houston’s unofficial kickoff to spring — that moment when azaleas, camellias, dogwoods, and early bulbs begin peaking across the city and residents head outdoors again. The event blends horticulture, history, architecture, and philanthropy into a weekend experience that consistently draws both dedicated gardeners and design-minded visitors from around the city and the region.

“Throughout the 88-year history of the Azalea Trail, select homeowners have generously offered an intimate look at their beautifully-curated private home gardens. In 2026, Azalea Trail goers will be able to tour four private home gardens featuring unique, breathtaking designs,” Emily Bolin and Hilary Purcel, chairs of this year’s River Oaks Garden Club Azalea Trail, tell CultureMap.

“Each location, which also includes Bayou Bend, Rienzi and the River Oaks Garden Club’s Forum, will offer an abundance of inspiration, including enticing planting combinations, creative concepts, emerging trends, and stunning floral displays. We hope to see everyone this weekend as we kick off the spring season in Houston.”

This year’s Trail runs March 6-8 and includes access to seven gardens for $35, spanning four private residential landscapes in the Tanglewood and close-in Memorial areas plus the aforementioned established cultural sites including Bayou Bend, Rienzi and the River Oaks Garden Club’s own Forum of Civics garden.

The private gardens — always a highlight — offer rare behind-the-gates access to curated residential landscapes showcasing planting combinations, emerging design ideas and seasonal floral displays that often influence Houston gardening trends. Meanwhile, the institutional stops provide historical context:

Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens: a 1926 River Oaks estate, now stewarded by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and surrounded by formal gardens and natural woodland landscapes, including azaleas, camellias, redbuds, and seasonal bulb displays planted by Garden Club members. Also, it is their 60th anniversary this year (opened to the public on March 5, 1966).

Rienzi: a former River Oaks residence turned MFAH house museum, where formal European-inspired gardens meet native Texas plantings.

Forum of Civics: the Garden Club’s historic River Oaks area headquarters, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Importantly, Trail proceeds directly fund local beautification, conservation, and horticultural education efforts, including historic garden preservation and environmental programming across Houston.

Tour the Ismaili Center

Just minutes away, the newly opened Ismaili Center, Houston — already earning international architectural attention — will offer complimentary public tours on March 7 and 8 from 8 am to 4 pm. The Center’s landscape makes it a compelling add-on to an Azalea Trail itinerary.

Designed by Thomas Woltz of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects — also responsible for recent projects at Rice University, Rothko Chapel, and Memorial Park — the more than nine acres of gardens reinterpret historic Islamic garden traditions through a contemporary Texas lens.

The design incorporates terraced lawns, shaded promenades, water features, and resilient plantings arranged as a symbolic ecological “transect of Texas,” moving from desert species to prairie and Gulf Coast plant communities. The landscape also doubles as environmental infrastructure, engineered to withstand major storm events while creating a calm, civic sanctuary overlooking Buffalo Bayou Park. Visitors that weekend can choose:

Full architectural/property tours
Focused garden introductions
Self-guided QR-enabled exploration

Together, the Azalea Trail and the Ismaili Center present a compelling narrative about Houston’s garden culture — where historic private landscapes and philanthropic garden traditions intersect with a globally-influenced new civic landscape designed for reflection, dialogue and public access.

The Azalea Trail will offer a free shuttle service between Rienzi and Bayou Bend. The locations of the four private homes on the tour will be sent via email with ticket purchase confirmations — street parking is available at all private home locations. The event will take place rain or shine, so keep an umbrella handy this weekend.

Courtesy of Bayou Bend

The tour includes Bayou Bend's impressive gardens.

gold pony club

Inside the creation of the rodeo cook-off’s most over-the-top tent

Courtesy of Cotton Holdings

The Gold Pony is the ultra-private VIP lounge behind the stage.

The Cotton Q Club is arguably the glitziest and most exclusive tent at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo’s annual World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest. Hosting nearly 800 invited guests-per-night, the 5,000-square-foot space includes a 50-foot bar, a new pop-up martini bar by Sophie Cocktail & Terrace Bar called “The Stirrup,” the ultra-exclusive “Gold Pony Club,” and a full stage for private concerts. This season, county music acts include Gabby Barrett, Sammy Kershaw, Josh Turner and Braxton Keith.

Aside from the obvious, what sets the club apart from the rest is the sheer magnitude of its operation. Once inside, guests are encapsulated by velvet-draped ceilings illuminated by crystal chandeliers, three-layer tartan-topped carpeting, richly-colored wooden-paneled walls, plus thousands of red roses swathed acrobatically throughout.

To coincide with the year of the horse, five enormous ponies made entirely of red roses have been suspended from the ceilings. The second additions this year hang on either side of the bar in The Gold Pony, the club’s even more exclusive VIP area. The kinetic artworks were created by Houston artist Sneha Merchant —all for a three day fête. This begs the question: how do they do it?

Cotton Holdings and its subsidiaries are well positioned to carry out the entire project themselves — so they do. Never bothered or besmirched by the possibility of running into issues with rental companies, everything at The Cotton Q Club is procured, purchased, and stored in-house. As one would expect from a company that provides disaster relief around the world.

“There is a lot of love and care put into this because we’re not in a hotel, we’re not in someone’s home,” Cotton Holdings chief marketing officer Zinat Ahmed tells CultureMap. “So for us to be able to create this entire infrastructure under a tent — down to the walls and chandeliers — it is much more than throwing a party. It’s about the details that make people feel that they are at a hotel, they are in an extravagant room, they are at The Polo Bar.”

Ahmed notes that a lot of the company’s culture is mixed into the tent, such as what Cotton does as a disaster relief company (including providing food by Cotton Culinary).

“Cotton Logistics puts up tents during a natural disaster. Seeing the Cotton team, whether it’s cleaning or moving things around, welcoming everyone, that’s part of our Cotton GDS — we restore communities after natural disasters. Our synergies in different parts of our day-to-day are here,” she says.

Ahmed’s team has complete creative control over the interior aesthetics of the club. Always sourcing anything that cannot be made in-house to local vendors is something she feels is important. Nothing is rented, not even the furniture or accessories.

“Every single thing, unless it was done by a local vendor, was done in-house: design, signage, execution — even the embroidery,” she explains

Everything is checked over during the summer months so there won’t be any surprises when the cook-off comes back around. Every item is organized, labeled, and stored either in Cotton’s warehouses, Conex boxes, or in special climate-controlled safes — down to the matchboxes.

“We are always prepared and ready to go,” explains Ahmed. “It’s not chaotic at all because we’re used to it — it’s a normal day at Cotton.”

When asked for her favorite parts of the tent this year, Ahmed readily answered that it has to be the five rose ponies in the main area of the club. Secondly, the two commissioned works by Sneha Merchant. Sprinkled in diamond dust, one is a female mallard wrapped in a boa, champagne flute in hand, while the other is a smartly-suited jackalope complete with cowboy hat and martini.

Both pieces are lit by antique sconces Ahmed sourced from Round Top, while the taxidermy Zebra heads are on loan from the Columbus, Texas ranch of Cotton Holdings’ Chairman Pete Bell.

“Every detail, down to the swatches of velvet has been thought of with a lot of love and care,” says Ahmed. “You use that mindset with something like this. So, if you have a mindset like before you deploy to a hurricane, you can do it for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.”

Courtesy of Cotton Holdings

The Gold Pony is the ultra-private VIP lounge behind the stage.

houston livestock show and rodeo home-design cotton holdings

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gold pony club

Inside the creation of the rodeo cook-off’s most over-the-top tent