Kinder Land Bridge restores coastal prairie and unites Houston’s Memorial Park

Kinder Land Bridge arsenic seen from Memorial Drive

Houston’s Memorial Park, a 1,500-acre municipality greenish space, has for years been sliced and diced by engaged roadways, keeping radical and wildlife from harmless entree to each parts of the park. Compounding this plan flaw, the heavy wooded parkland took a deed from Hurricane Ike successful 2008 and again during the punishing drought that culminated successful 2011. These 2 events killed disconnected astir fractional of the park’s trees.

Local planners mightiness person undertaken a monolithic tree-planting run and called it good. Instead, visionaries reimagined Memorial Park, raising funds and drafting up a maestro program for a onshore span to reunite the park, with greenish abstraction and paths that soar implicit roadway tunnels, portion below-grade a culvert allows further wildlife passage. The program besides calls for acres of coastal prairie restoration alternatively than reforestation — a harder merchantability to the nationalist than trees.

The Kinder Land Bridge and coastal prairie project opened to the nationalist successful February 2023. I walked implicit to spot it from the Houston Arboretum a mates weeks ago, pursuing a pedestrian way lined with black-eyed Susans and different autochthonal wildflowers.

The plantings are inactive caller and bash see immoderate trees. But the prairie plants — grasses and herbaceous flowering plants, i.e., forbs — volition bash the dense lifting erstwhile it comes to soaking up stormwater. Coastal prairie besides provides diverseness of situation for wildlife, with pollinator plants that pull insects and seed-bearing grasses for birds and different creatures. Here’s more info from the Memorial Park Conservancy during the readying phase:

“The Land Bridge and Prairie task is an ecological conversion process, and trees removed during this process volition either beryllium relocated oregon repurposed wrong the Park to enactment a web of autochthonal Gulf Coastal Prairie and Savanna ecologies, arsenic envisioned by the Memorial Park Master Plan. These ecologies erstwhile extended implicit 9 cardinal acres from Corpus Christi, Texas[,] to Lafayette, Louisiana. Today, little than 1% of autochthonal Gulf Coastal Prairie situation remains. Native prairie and savanna ecology is much resilient than the forested situation that exists successful this country contiguous and volition beforehand determination biodiversity of some works and wildlife taxon portion besides helping to sorb and cleanable stormwater.”

The walk/bike way that arcs up the onshore span is marked by etched paragraphs that springiness a wide-angle presumption of the region’s history. Here we are astatine 8,000 BCE, erstwhile Earth’s clime was warming and Texas was transitioning from forests to grasslands. Bison grazed the coastal prairies of Texas.

By 6,000 BCE, a agelong drought turned Galveston Bay into a valley, and the modern Texas coastline was taking shape.

In the existent era, the coastal prairie has mostly vanished, but “a imaginativeness for a much resilient Memorial Park is adopted.”

From atop the onshore bridge, you spot prairie plantings and downtown Houston

At the apical of the onshore bridge, a circular plaza with built-in benches (not pictured) creates abstraction to remainder oregon people-watch oregon to clasp assemblage gatherings. Markers adjacent bespeak wherever to ticker the sunrise connected the equinox and solstice. Thomas Woltz, main of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, the steadfast that created the park’s maestro plan, said successful a Houston Chronicle interview, “In a fractured society, however bash we link radical to each different with a consciousness of community? One mode is to make an acquisition of awe, and that’s a occupation for scenery architects….Feeling much connected to nine gives maine anticipation for bringing backmost civility successful our nine and caring for 1 different and the places we love, similar Memorial Park.”

I emotion seeing projects similar this 1 greening up and restoring autochthonal plants successful our over-paved — oregon over-lawned — cities. Are determination others you cognize about? For different illustration successful Texas, work my station astir Native Texas Park astatine the George W. Bush Presidential Library successful Dallas. Way to go, Texas cities!

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