Peacocks have had the run of this hillside garden above Lake Austin since 1935, when friends gave Mary Frances Gutsch and her husband a pair of them as a Christmas present. The birds bred, and the ones fanning their tails at visitors today are descended from that gift. They are not confined and not shy, and they roost in the live oaks and on the roof of the cottage. The cottage was built in the 1870s. Allison Mayfield, a Texas secretary of state, bought it in 1909 as a country place, and it passed in 1922 to his only daughter Mary Frances, who with her husband, the University of Texas historian Milton Gutsch, spent decades turning the grounds into a garden of lily ponds, stone walls and palms. Their gardener Esteban Arredondo, known as Steve, worked the place for forty years. Mrs Gutsch willed the whole property to the City of Austin in 1971, and it is a free public park now, about twenty three acres of it, with a nature preserve of wooded trails running down the bluff behind the gardens toward the water. The combination is unusual even for Austin: a small formal garden with peafowl walking through it, and a quarter hour later, if you keep going downhill, a genuinely quiet stretch of woods with no sign of the city in it.
Getting there
30.3140, -97.7702
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
