Opinion

It's time to restore Houston's natural prairie

The Houston Parks and Recreation Department is sponsoring a project to replace nonnative plants in parts of Hermann Park with native prairie species. The Houston Parks and Recreation Department is sponsoring a project to replace nonnative plants in parts of Hermann Park with native prairie species. Photo: Johnny Hanson Photo: Johnny Hanson Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close It's time to restore Houston's natural prairie 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Hopefully many Houstonians will heed Joe Turner's call for volunteers to help replant Houston's urban forest ("On Arbor Day, join the effort to replant Houston," Page B7, Jan. 4).

Trees are an important part of Houston's cultural heritage. Beginning with the early settlers, humans planted and nurtured the trees that are so much a part of the city. However, the tall-grass prairie, rather than the forest, is Houston's true natural heritage. In areas opened up by trees that died in the drought, the Houston Parks and Recreation Department (HPARD) has the opportunity to restore the native prairie grasses and wildflowers that used to grow here.

For millennia before the first European settlers came to Harris County, almost all of the county was coastal prairie, a tall-grass prairie like those of the American Midwest. Trees grew only in the northeastern part of the county and along the bayou banks, where more water was available. Prairie Street downtown was so named because that was where the prairie started.

Today, our natural prairie heritage is almost completely gone. According to accounts from early travelers, they saw "a broad and beautiful prairie, where … for miles there was not a tree to be seen, unless at a great distance;" Sam Houston's army marched through a prairie with grass "as tall as a horse's belly" on its way to surprise Santa Ana's soldiers; Galveston Island in the early years had only one live oak, the rest being covered by a vast prairie. Since then, the prairie has been converted to farms and development or destroyed by overgrazing, by invasions of alien plants and by fire suppression. Only recently have more people realized that unless we start preserving our natural heritage, it will soon disappear, just like the bison, horned lizard and Attwater's prairie chicken, which once numbered a million and today, fewer than 200.

By planting native prairie grasses and wildflowers in medians and park areas where the trees have died, HPARD can be part of the effort to preserve Houston's heartland, its coastal prairie. At the same time, HPARD can offer parkgoers a beautiful landscape that costs less to mow (once or twice per year) and requires no irrigation once the plants are established. This summer, in the few small prairie remnants and in pocket prairies planted within the past couple of years, native grasses and wildflowers, unlike many trees, survived the summer heat and drought and then burst into full bloom, offering a spectacular sight after our September and October rains. On the prairie were the pink gulf muhly grass, the native blue sage, the yellow Texas coneflowers, the rust-colored little bluestem grass and even red Indian paintbrushes blooming out of season. Mother Nature showed us this summer that without human intervention, Houston's natural climate and rainfall and periodic wildfires can sustain a prairie, but not a forest.

HPARD has been extremely supportive of Project Blazing Star, a Hermann Park Conservancy project started by Jaime Gonzalez of the Katy Prairie Conservancy and Barbara Jo Harwell of the Hermann Park Conservancy to plant small pocket prairies in Hermann Park. HPARD could expand prairie landscapes to more Houston parks and to esplanades. Don Verser suggested an even bolder project: create five acres of prairie or savannah in areas of Memorial Park with massive tree loss. Such a landscape makes sense when we are in a drought, when more drought is predicted, when water for our expanding population will soon be a problem, and when loss of natural habitat has led to significant declines in population of grassland birds and other wildlife.

The once expansive North American tall-grass prairie is a rarity today and is one of the most endangered large habitats on Earth. Our coastal tall-grass prairie has been called "the rarest of the rare." Houstonians need to join together to not only restore the beautiful prairie to our city, but more importantly, to preserve the very, very few existing fragments of pristine prairie remnants that have never been plowed. One such remnant is a 50-acre prairie in Deer Park that the Chronicle's Lisa Gray recently wrote about ("The prairie hunters find a pristine example," Page G1, Nov. 20). The topography, the soil and the species of plants on this fragment are the same today as they were thousands of years ago. If HPARD would restore some parkland to prairie and a loose, still forming coalition of citizens could save a few pristine prairie remnants, we can begin to bring back to Houston its natural heritage, an ecosystem that provides habitat for wildlife, that helps reduce flooding by absorbing and holding water after a rainfall, that provides us with beautiful, sustainable green space and that gives us a sense of place and a connection with nature.

For those wishing to learn more, The Coastal Prairie Partnership website (www.coastal prairiepartnership.org) and the brochure "Paradise Lost?" provide a wealth of information. On a Native Prairie Association of Texas website one can find an article describing how a prairie is different from common fields of grass. Open to visitors are the pocket prairies in the city (at Russ Pitman Park in Bellaire and Whistlestop Prairie in Hermann Park), as well as larger prairie restoration areas around Houston.

Shen is a member of the Texas Master Naturalists, Gulf Coast Chapter (GCMN); Native Plant Society of Texas; and Native Prairie Association of Texas.