AHS LIVE: Behind-the-Scenes Garden Tour: Headwaters at the Comal
with Nancy Pappas, managing director, Headwaters at the Comal and John Asher, landscape designer, Blackland Collaborative
Friday, April 24, 2026 from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. CT
New Braunfels, TX
$50 AHS members/$60 non-members
The Headwaters at the Comal sits at a remarkable moment in its transformation, and visitors on this tour will experience all three chapters of its story firsthand. The journey begins in the recently completed past: a former industrial hardscape now reimagined as a Low Impact Development parking lot and entrance garden, where native plants, rain gardens, and swales intercept and treat stormwater before it ever reaches the Comal River watershed. The tour then moves into the living present. The approximately quarter mile trail walk winds through established landscape born from a major 2016-2017 restoration that diverted over 12,000 pounds of pollutants from the Comal’s headwater spring run and has since matured into a thriving corridor of biodiversity offering rare refuge for native species in a region where natural habitat is rapidly disappearing. Finally, the group will witness the future taking shape in real time: the ongoing removal of remaining asphalt and impervious cover, and the conversion of existing structures into interpretive nature centers for the community. This is restoration not as a finished product, but as a living process and this tour offers a front-row seat.