Teas Nursery Company

The nursery on this plaque stayed on its 1910 ground for almost a century, and the ground is now a park. Teas Nursery sold plants on this block until 2009, after the death of Edward Teas's grandson John. That year brothers Jerry and Maury Rubenstein bought the land through their foundation, ahead of other developers, to make a public park named for their mother, Evelyn Rubenstein. A conservancy formed in 2011, voters approved $5 million in bonds in 2013, and SWA Group and Lake|Flato designed the grounds. Evelyn's Park opened on Earth Day, April 22, 2017.

What the plaque says

Teas Nursery Company Teas Nursery Company traces its history to 1843, when John C. Teas (1827-1907) began selling apples out of his back yard in Indiana. After moving the business to Missouri in 1868, Teas became a nationally prominent horticulturist. In 1908 his son, horticulturist Edward Teas, Sr. (1870-1951), met developer W. W. Baldwin who was then planning the community of Westmoreland Farms and the town of Bellaire in southwest Harris County. Baldwin hired Teas to execute the planting designs for Bellaire Boulevard and adjacent streets. Teas started work in Bellaire early in 1909. The next year, he moved his family from Missouri to this site and opened Teas Nursery Company. Initially specializing in the sale of fruit trees and flowering shrubs and plants, the business was later expanded to include landscaping services. The company's early projects included the landscaping of Rice Institute (now Rice University) and the River Oaks subdivision. By 1951 Teas Nursery had planted over one million trees in the Houston area. Edward Teas died the same year, leaving ownership of the nursery to his descendants. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 3.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 3.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.9 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 4.8 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Texan Capture of Mexican Dispatches (San Jacinto) — 0.8 mi
• City of West University Place — 1.0 mi
• Bellaire Streetcar Line — 1.0 mi
• Southside Place Park — 1.0 mi