If color brands like “bandana cherry,” “solar flare” and “brake lights” make you think of car finishes or fingernail polish, think again.

These are the warm tints of perennials — a variety of lantana, tecoma and red yucca, respectively — that are the flowering foundation of the San Antonio Botanical Garden’s 8-acre, $22 million expansion, opening next Saturday.

The expansion, which was some 30 years in the making, reflects a new emphasis on interactivity at the garden, and new features include a grand entryway off of North New Braunfels Avenue, upgraded ticketing and educational facilities, an expanded gift shop and, perhaps most exciting, a culinary garden with an outdoor kitchen — all designed and constructed with the landscape, rather than buildings, as “the star of the show.”

“A lot of it is about color and texture and fun, and visually moving the eye through all these hot colors — reds, yellows, oranges,” said Bob Brackman, executive director of the botanical garden. “We have all kinds of interesting plants through here. We want to establish a real sense of arrival, to show people what they’ve not seen in San Antonio before, even at our own garden.”

Visitors now will drive through a curved concrete Garden Gateway, which provides a graceful, rhythmic new point of entry to the now 38-acre botanical garden, which opened in 1980 and draws 150,000 visitors annually, one-third of them children younger than 13.

The expansion is projected to increase attendance by 35 percent, or by about 52,000 more visitors, officials said.

The gateway leads to the Live Oak Allée (French for alley), with more than 30 trees — about half of them recently planted 15-footers — on each side of Garden Boulevard. The oaks eventually can grow up to 50 feet tall, creating an entry arbor overhead.

The allée borders a new Parking Garden, landscaped with blooming shrubs and muhly grasses, which is adjacent to a large plaza bordered by resting and gathering places called the Cypress Courtyard and Garden Gate Terrace.

The plaza leads to a new 11,000-square-foot complex whose features include the Halsell Welcome Building, housing ticketing and administrative operations, as well as “the best gift shop in South Texas,” according to Brackman.

Those previously mentioned colorful perennials, along with some 50 other varieties of plants, from spiky agave to purple Joseph’s coat, grow up the hillside of the nearby Mays Family Display Garden. Punctuated by a cascading water feature and low limestone-block walls, which recall the property’s history as a rock quarry, the display garden is a focal point of the park.

With tickets in hand, guests can proceed to the H-E-B Discovery Center, which houses multimedia educational programming, including the Exploration Station.

Visitors can plan their day at the botanical garden, find out what’s blooming at the Bloom Cart and learn about the region’s plants and water history. Tours gather here, and the garden’s conservation programs, including a 29,000-gallon underground cistern, are explained.

The discovery center also features two “dirty” classrooms where visiting students — up to 50 at a time — can get hands-on introductions to aspects of ecology, biology and chemistry. A small amphitheater will feature everything from poetry readings to birds of prey demonstrations.

One of the most intriguing features of the botanical garden expansion is the Culinary Garden, with the adjacent CHEF (Culinary Health Education for Families) Teaching Kitchen under chef Dave Terrazas in the Goldsbury Foundation Pavilion.

Nearly 200 fruits and vegetables — from Meyer lemons to Swiss chard — will grow seasonally in 34 limestone-bordered beds, driving programming on good nutrition, gardening and environmental stewardship, as well as providing ingredients for cooking demonstrations, classes and special culinary events.

From the centrally located Mays garden, visitors have a choice: take a wide, gently curving concrete promenade past a gurgling new ground-level fountain and head back up into the existing garden — the Texas Native Trail and the Lucile Halsell Conservatory — or take another path leading to the new 2.5-acre Family Adventure Garden, with nature play and learning areas such as Thunder Ridge and Prickly Pear Peak, all opening March 3, 2018.

“With the expansion, the botanical garden has really become a 21st-century trans-formative garden,” said John Troy, president of the San Antonio Botanical Garden Society and a board member since 1989. “The old garden is beautiful to walk through and look at and contemplate, and that is wonderful. But we’re setting a standard with the new expansion of people interacting with the garden, whether it’s the culinary garden and kitchen or the nature play of the Family Adventure Garden. It’s not just a swing in a park. It requires people to get involved and participate in the activities and programs offered.”

The San Antonio Botanical Garden has a rich history. Prior to 1877, the eastern end of Mahncke Park was a limestone quarry. In the 1880s, it became a reservoir (where the sunken amphitheater is now) for George W. Brackenridge’s San Antonio Water System.

The idea for a public garden was conceived in the 1940s, and voters approved $265,000 in city bonds for the garden in 1970. Ground was broken in 1976 and the garden opened to the public May 3, 1980.

The seeds of the current expansion date back 30 years to the 1987 opening of the steel-and-glass Halsell Conservatory structures designed by renowned Argentinian architect Emilio Ambasz, Troy said. Funston Street at that time ran right along the edge of the garden property, and the board began thinking of ways to provide a buffer from traffic.

Four master plans later, with land secured along Funston, construction started on the expansion two years ago, with the main players being lead architect Ten Eyck Landscape Architects of Austin, Weddle Gilmore Black Rock Studio of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Kopplow Construction of San Antonio.

“As a landscape architect myself, I can tell you it’s unusual for the lead architect to be the landscape architect, but that says something about this project,” Troy said. “The architect that we ended up using told us upfront that their aim was to make architecture that didn’t look like architecture.”

The buildings of the expansion are certainly unobtrusive. The low, curving, organic structures are made of neutral concrete — inspired by the limestone quarries of the region as well as the river landforms of South Texas — on durable steel structures, with natural touches like the use of 200-year-old sinker cypress pulled from Louisiana swamps in the ceiling decking of the pavilion and classroom.

“It was important to us that the architecture feel integrated into the botanical experience,” Black Rock Studio partner Philip Weddle said. “The star of the show is the botanical gardens; the architecture should work hard to be a good supporting character.”

The structure and landscape architecture were integrated from the earliest design stages, to frame views of the landscape as well as the iconic Ambasz buildings in passageways and to highlight the water-harvesting strategies that capture water from building roofs as well as mechanical systems.

Brackman said the botanical garden is LID, or a low-impact development, which refers to a collective design for land-planning and engineering that incorporates everything from bioswales to channel water where it’s most needed to drought-resistant, native plants.

The entire garden sits atop a hill, which slopes down toward New Braunfels Avenue and has great views of downtown. Visitors may notice “check dams” at various points in the garden, which are indentations filled with pieces of old parking lot curbs, to slow down the water flow and allow it to sink into the earth.

Christine Ten Eyck, the lead architect of the expansion, said a major component of the botanical garden’s water-recycling system is a massive, 20-by-30-foot, 29,000-gallon cistern buried 15 feet under the Culinary Garden.

She explained that the buildings’ “sweat,” or air-conditioning condensate, is used along with rain water to supply water to all of the new fountains and the irrigation system.

“This, along with use of native plants, ensures we can make it through drought,” she said. “We harvest water at the site like a sponge, which helps take pressure off of the San Antonio River watershed. Water is our most precious resource, so it is fitting that we treat it with respect as it makes its way through the garden.”

Garden officials stress that the main thrust of the expansion is to expand and deepen ties with the community, through culinary and educational programs, and by strengthening our bond with nature.

“I think we have really advanced ourselves as a cultural institution in San Antonio,” Troy said, “but more than that, we’ve really grounded ourselves for the future.” sbennett@express-news.net