CLEAN’s Brays Bayou Wildscape Garden:
Native plant rescue for beauty and survival
by Vicki Wolf March 2009

“If we destroy this ecosystem, we will be in big trouble,” cautions Doug Tallamay, author of “Bringing Nature Home.” The destruction of natural habitat at the current rate will leave no place for wildlife to live or find food to survive. According to Tallamay, we have 200,000 species in this country and 33,000 are imperiled with many more on the way to extinction. But finding ways to include native plants in gardens and landscapes can start to slow down the loss of birds, butterflies, and many other living things by simply sharing space with them.

This is not just about the joy of seeing a butterfly emerge from its cocoon or hearing the first bird’s song in the morning, it’s about sustaining life on the planet. The diversity of native plants, insects and animals play a role in a balanced ecosystem that provides oxygen, clean water and healthy topsoil, all essential to sustaining human life on Earth.Tallamay says landscaping in the United States has replaced natural habitat with 45.6 billion acres of lawn, and “that is very hard on biodiversity. Only 5 percent of pristine nature is left.” He suggests that today home gardens and small patches of preserves can play a role in slowing down species extinction and saving the ecosystem.

 

To encourage appreciation and preservation of native plants and the vanishing Harris County coastal prairie, Terry O’Rourke, CLEAN (Citizens League for Environmental Action Now) board member, environmental attorney and avid gardener, the Houston Audobon Society and the City of Houston are collaborating to create the CLEAN Brays Bayou Wildscape Garden. The seed for the new garden began to germinate when O’Rourke sold his home on Fairhope Street and learned that the buyer planned to “scrape” the garden. “I started thinking about how I could save this garden I had built for 20 years, one plant at a time from my visits to High Island to see birds.” Each visit, O’Rourke bought native plants like red salvia, hummingbird bush and others to attract birds and butterflies from the Audobon Society’s plant sale in Boy Scout Woods. His garden became a dense, shaded habitat. “I built that garden one shovel at a time,” O’Rourke says. “I didn’t want my garden to die.”

 

O’Rourke transplanted some of the plants to his new home -- mulberry trees, hummingbird bush, shrimp plant, firecracker fern, turks cap and many others -- but he needed more space. “I looked at Brays Bayou’s anemic environment left over from flood control as an opportunity,” he recalls. With approval from the City of Houston Parks and Recreation Department Adoption Program to renovate and enhance the Brays Bayou Parkway, O’Rourke began creating a hummingbird/butterfly garden on a 30’ by 330’ strip of land in the 3200 block of South Braeswood. The garden is parallel to South Braeswood and bordered by Brays Bayou Hike and Bike Trail.

O’Rourke contacted the Houston Audobon Society to see if they would be interested in the project. He was fortunate to get in touch with Flo Hannah, Houston Audobon senior sanctuary steward, who is involved in another plant rescue mission.

 

Hannah is working to rescue the last remaining coastal prairie in Harris County from Saums Road before construction begins there. She is planting native pocket prairie’s with 100 percent native species. Her passion for native plant rescue comes from her understanding of what is being lost in the home gardens that feature plants from other parts of the world instead of native plants. “We are planting ornamentals -- aliens -- that are chosen by the plant trade for pest resistance. We are knocking out a level of insects, and when we lose them we lose the wildlife that depends on them,” Hannah says. “Songbirds depend on insects for feeding their nesting young and insects live on native plants,” she adds.

 

Hannah took O’Rourke for a visit to the Russ Pitman Park to see an example of a pocket prairie, and he was convinced that the coastal prairie from Saums Road would enhance the beauty of the garden and the ability to attract wildlife to the garden. Hannah explains that by landscaping with plants native to the area, the Wildscape Garden will be supporting a diversity of insects that have co-evolved with these plants. Ninety-six percent of all North American land birds are dependent upon insects as a food resource. Consequently, more birds are attracted to native plant gardens.

“I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to place native plants in a high-visibility location for the greatest number of people to learn and understand how beautiful our native coastal prairie is,” Hannah says. “The Wildscape Garden is an ideal location for this plant material to provide an education outreach opportunity.”

Hannah has acquired donations and funding to mechanically move about 1,000 square feet of Saums Road Prairie material and have them transported to the CLEAN Brays Wildscape Garden. O’Rourke had the site prepared for the plants.

 

The plants that have been transplanted from O’Rourke’s Fairhope Garden and from Saums Road are having a high survival rate. O’Rourke says during Hurricane Ike, the native plants lapped up the flooding and weathered the storm very well. From the seed bank in the top soil, other plants will emerge. Hannah expects as many as 200 species will grow in the Wildscape Garden.

 

Both O’Rourke and Hannah hope that the CLEAN Brays Bayou Wildscape Garden will help people understand the beauty of native landscape, and the insects and birds that it attracts. “When you see it, you see that it is extremely diverse with wildflowers and grasses,” Hannah says. “It changes with each season.”

“Watching the relationship between the milkweed and the monarch butterfly gave me the experience,” O’Rourke says. “When you watch, you begin to see that the milkweed and butterfly are one -- you are watching milkweed turn into caterpillar, turn into butterfly.”

 

Dry, desert and prairie ecosystems do not have the large attractive flowers that so many people love to see. Imported plants, in this climate, must be watered every day and often treated with chemicals to keep the insects, sometimes referred to as pests, away.

 

“Embrace where you live, and enjoy nature where you live, instead of phoney, sterile landscapes,” suggests Doug Tallamay.O’Rourke would like to see more people planting wildscape gardens in their front yards. “My wish for the wildscape prairie garden is that when people see the beauty of the garden, they will say, ‘I want one of those. I don’t want to mow my suburban monoscape anymore.’”