With $14.2 million raised toward its $16.7 million goal, the San Antonio Botanical Garden plans to break ground this summer on an 8-acre expansion that aims to reinforce messages of environmental stewardship and health and wellness.

The plan, created by Ten Eyck Landscape Architects of Austin, will transform a strip of land along Funston Place that has served as parking overflow for the garden. The blueprints divide the space among an environmentally sensitive parking area and an entrance under a canopy of live oaks, a culinary garden with an outdoor demonstration kitchen and a family garden where caregivers and children can explore nature together. The target opening date is spring 2017.

“This is a very nature-based play environment where kids can roam free,” said project manager Cameron Campbell, a landscape architect with Ten Eyck. Children will be able to run through rock gardens, climb boulders, build twig forts and dig for worms.

“Getting muddy is going to be encouraged here, because kids just aren’t getting that as much as they should be in urban settings,” said Campbell, a San Antonio native who grew up going to the Botanical Garden.

Public gardens play a critical role in drawing children away from technology, said Abigail Spencer of the American Public Gardens Association, an Pennsylvania-based organization of more than 500 public gardens.

“More and more people are trying to get their kids out of the house. The big trend is to get kids away from technology and outside,” she said.

Many gardens, too, are catering to visitors in their late teens and early 20s.

Brackman said about 40,000 of last year’s 130,000 visitors were schoolchildren.

“Our hope is that everyone will dig in the dirt and touch and feel and smell all the things the plant world has to offer,” said Claire Liedtke Alexander, a member of the San Antonio Botanical Society. The nonprofit and the city of San Antonio oversee the garden.

Most of the funding is coming from private donations. The Ewing Halsell Foundation donated $3 million to the project, and the San Antonio Botanical Society Board of Directors kicked in $1.3 million. Another $1.2 million comes from the city’s 2012-2017 bond package voters approved in May 2007, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission awarded a $1 million grant toward the family garden.

The changes will reframe the existing garden, giving it a “wow factor,” garden executive director Bob Brackman said.

Campbell said designers considered the history of the site, which was a limestone quarry and reservoir for city drinking water before becoming a public garden in 1980. The addition weaves together the garden’s variety architecture, such as the glass conservatories and historic buildings such as the Sullivan Carriage House that serves as the current entrance.

“It’s making new connections the garden never had before,” he said.

The planting plan calls for 700 new trees, in addition to shrubs, perennials and groundcovers.

In the Family Adventure Garden, children — and likely adults, too — will be able to roll down Tumble Hill, a gentle slope carpeted in Bermuda grass and weave through the waving native grasses of Muhly Maze.

They also will be able to climb trails to Prickly Pear Peak, a 25-foot mound that will be created from dirt moved during construction of the new parking garden. The hill will be the pinnacle of an area that simulates the Texas Hill Country.

Play leaders will be available to prompt guide activity, said Karen Greenwood, part of the botanical society design team.

“Then they can go home or go to another park or wildlife area and feel comfortable engaging in nature. That comfort in nature is not always there,” said Greenwood, who with husband Jim co-chairs the botanical society’s Grow campaign.

In addition to getting children in touch with nature, gardens also educate adults about environmental concerns, the public garden association’s executive director Casey Sclar said.

A culinary garden designed as part of the San Antonio garden expansion will engage the community in growing edible plants, teaching what vegetables, fruits and herbs can be grown here, and how they can be cultivated everywhere from an apartment balcony to a small patio, Brackman said.

A demonstration kitchen planned as part of the discovery center at the new entrance will provide space for teaching how food can be used.

Learning opportunities will extend to the facilities, too, which will include capture and reuse of air-conditioner condensate in water features and the use of landscape design to minimize stormwater runoff.

“We’re tapping into the condensate and storing it in an underground cistern. That cistern will supply all of the water for all of the water features in the new project,” he said.

A network of rain gardens that will run through the entrance will capture stormwater and prevent runoff, he said.

“This garden is almost like a living laboratory of very simple technologies that are used in the landscape,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to put them on display and inspire the city and the people who live there to use them more.”

The project echoes growth among other cultural institutions along Broadway, a couple of blocks west of the garden, which is at Funston Place at North New Braunfels Avenue.

The $47 million DoSeum at 2800 Broadway will welcome its first guests June 6. The Mays Family Center for Special Exhibitions is slated to open in summer 2016 as part of a $60 million expansion at the Witte Museum at 3801 Broadway.

“We have definitely rich growth on the Broadway corridor,” District 2 City Councilman Alan Warrick said. “This is another added benefit to the Mahncke Park neighborhood as well as to the entire community.”

tlehmann@express-news.net