Memorial Park_rosa_barba

People and nature have reclaimed Houston's largest public park, which was a wasteland100 years after its founding. Climate extremes—a four-year drought and two hurricanes killed 80% of trees in Memorial Park's 600 hectares. In response, thousands of Houstonians helped the design team, over two years, to imagine the park's first full plan reviving biodiversity and opening universal access to all visitors. The 2015 plan injects regenerative natural energies; deep research unlocked clues from the land of indigenous uses and remnant ecologies for an extensive revegetation newly vibrant with wildlife. The plan completely transforms the park's social life: It fills daily with people—6 million a year—drawn by the sensory pleasures found along winding paths, vigorous meadows and prairies, and enchanting forests and by modernized amenities for sport, fitness, play, celebration, and meditation. Long divided by a six-lane highway today the park is again a vibrant whole. At its heart, two large earthen land bridges (using inoculated site soils) hide traffic under a lush savanna sloping down to 18 hectares of buzzing Gulf Coastal prairie while a tunnel under the highway circulates water from storms through the prairie wetland and toward the river, also allowing amphibians and other animals cross. Nature is recolonizing! And today people arrive through a redesigned experience that commemorates the road where long-ago soldiers-in-training once entered Camp Logan, to prepare for battle in WWI. This new part of the park, Eastern Glades, opens to expansive lawns and picnic areas around a constructed lake and wetland rich with birds, amphibians, and invertebrates. Memorial Park is named to honor those soldiers, and they will be commemorated by a towering grove of bald cypress trees. Where Houstonians had so recently seen climate catastrophe in Memorial Park, they rose to rescue it and bring it resiliency for nature's sake, for their own sake and the sake of their city’s future.