For one thing, an architectural walking tour of historic downtown will take you past hotels built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as cafes and businesses from the same period. You will see an eclectic mix of styles ranging from Classic Revival to Victorian, Romanesque and Italianate. The 1929 Art Deco Medical Arts building was once the tallest structure in Arkansas — 180 feet above street level.

Many of those old buildings are now filled with art galleries — the number and quality of which have put Hot Springs at No. 4 on the "100 Best Art Towns in America" list.

Don't be surprised, however, if your favorite bricks in Hot Springs turn out to be ones you don't even see: the bricks made by the Malvern Brick Co., which in turn paved the way for the Garvan Woodland Gardens.

Owned by Arthur B. Cook, the company was taken over by his daughter, Verna Cook Garvan, after his premature death in 1934. Garvan, then 22, became the first female CEO of a major southern manufacturing business and served in that capacity until her retirement in 1970.

Using part of the brickmaking fortune she accrued, she turned a 210-acre peninsula jutting out into Lake Hamilton that she inherited from her father into a special place. For more than 40 years, she gardened there. She personally chose every plant that was added or subtracted and introduced hundreds of rare, as well as native plants, shrubs and trees. She planted 160 different types of azaleas and an equal number of roses. She let parts grow wild as a bird sanctuary.

Upon her death in 1993, she willed the area to the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Arkansas. In 2000, after the property cleared probate and a master plan was drawn up, the university began to develop the Garvan Woodland Gardens, using some 40 acres of the peninsula, into a world-class botanical site.

Many of Garvan's original ideas and plants are still there, but there are now hundreds of thousands of plantings. They line walking paths that serve up one delight after another: cascading waterfalls, quaint bridges, fern glades, Japanese gardens. Everywhere there is a riot of color that draws painters by the score.

They will tell you that the gardens are beautiful any time of year, offering a changing panorama of hues and textures, but spring is surely the most breathtaking, with miles of tulips, fields of daffodils, clouds of dogwood.

The newest addition is the Anthony Chapel, a striking non-denominational, wood-and-glass structure that is used for weddings, receptions or just for meditation.