The Garden Club of Houston

The designer this plaque calls a New York landscape architect had made Houston her home. Ruth London, born in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, in 1892, studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts, and worked in the offices of Ellen Shipman and others before moving to Houston in 1930. She opened her own practice in 1932 and designed gardens chiefly for Garden Club of Houston members, treating them as outdoor rooms. Several were on the 1939 Garden Club of America convention tour. She later landscaped the Navy hospital, urged native plants by 1954, and died in 1966.

What the plaque says

The Garden Club of Houston In 1924, seven friends who lived near the newly constructed Museum of Fine Arts formed the Garden Club of Houston. They planned to study horticulture, experiment with new plants and further the beautification of the city of Houston. From this small beginning developed an institution that has had a great influence on the city's private and public landscapes. Garden Club members assumed the maintenance of the museum grounds in 1931. Noted New York landscape architect Ruth London designed a master plan for the museum's south garden including a balustrade and bench designed by William Ward Watkin, the museum architect, with sculpture by the head of the museum school. Contributions from members and club projects made possible the completion of the garden in time for the national meeting of the Garden Club of America in 1939. Because of its work on the museum grounds, the Garden Club of Houston was the first in the southwest to become a part of the Garden Club of America. In 1942 a bulb and plant mart became the Garden Club's main fundraiser. Many plants seen at these sales became familiar staples in area gardens. The Texas Medical Center Park, the hospice at the Texas Medical Center, the Museum of Natural Science, the Harris County Center for the Retarded, the Seaman's Center at the Port of Houston, Tranquility Park, Bayou Bend, Rienzi, Armand Bayou Nature Center and Buffalo Bayou Sesquicentennial Park are among the projects and civic organizations that benefit from the Garden Club of Houston's fundraising efforts. Many notable Houstonians have been among the small membership of the Garden Club of Houston, unusual in its longevity and success. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — steps away
  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 — 1.0 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.
• The Menil Collection — 1.0 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.1 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

• St. Paul's United Methodist Church — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church of Houston — 0.2 mi
• W. L. and Susan Clayton — 0.3 mi
• Maurice Joseph Sullivan — 0.3 mi