THEY PLAY WELL WITH NATURE
Environment’s part of the charm in new neighborhood parks for kids
Under a cloudless sky at a new park in south Cinco Ranch, preschoolers built a fort using big blue blocks and a little help from their parents.
The tots climbed a hill made from slabs of Texas slate for a turn on a slide lined with rollers. Older kids tried to coax sound out of a footbridge with planks that doubled as xylophone bars. Their mallets were whatever they could find nearby, rocks from the ground and shoes from their feet.
While splash pads and climbing walls were once in vogue, a new generation of neighborhood playgrounds is taking hold, with a great- er focus on nature and creativity than big plastic slides and squeaky metal swing sets.
Nature-themed parks are becoming more prevalent in Houston’s masterplanned communities as developers respond to demand from homebuyers for amenities centered on nature and healthy living.
“It’s definitely happening more and more all over the place,” said Scott McCready a principal with SWA, a landscape architecture firm. “As conversations about ecology and nature in our communities in general are being elevated, that translates to the playgrounds.”
Cinco Ranch’s Explo-
ration Park in the prosperous Katy-area neighborhood offers a natural landscape with a sensory garden, manmade hills and blocks for building.
There are still swings and slides, but they’re unlike what is normally found in a suburban park. Kids can jump on and off an eight-person “snake swing” that sways next to a three-story tube slide. A “seesaw” swing works like a hanging teeter-totter.
Giving kids options
One of the main ideas behind the project was to allow the children to determine how they play by offering them options that don’t have a prescribed use, such as the blue blocks piled throughout the playground. Kids use them to make forts, walls and other structures they might think up.
The way the space is designed, new activities are revealed each time a child returns, said JJ Obee of TBG Partners, the landscape architecture firm that designed the park, which cost nearly $1.7 million and was paid for by bonds sold by the Willow Fork Drainage District.
McCready, whose firm was the lead consultant on the newly completed Buffalo Bayou Park, said such parks encourage children to use their imagination.
“It kind of works a different side of the brain for kids,” McCready said. “The tendency is to want to script a certain experience, like playing on a toy car or toy house. Natural landscapes are really forcing kids to use their imagination a little more.”
Exploration Park, located along the north side of a water-diversion channel, opened over the summer to big crowds. Additional parking spots had to be added to accommodate the growing number of visitors.
“There were 100 cars here when it opened, and it was in the middle of July,” Obee said.
Laura Morris, who lives about 4 miles away, heard about the park on Facebook. Now she brings her two preschoolage children there at least once a week.
“She would live in the swing with the netted bottom,” Morris said of her daughter, pointing to the so-called basket swing.
Developers have been incorporating more green spaces to their communities in recent years, in part to help sell homes.
“People buying homes are looking for places that express this value of nature and healthy living,” said McCready, whose firm is also designing a park for developer and home builder Toll Brothers in a community north of Houston called Woodson’s Reserve.
More than 115 acres there have been designated for open areas, nature preserves and trails.
Among the planned amenities is a playground that incorporates a “treehouse concept,” said Karl Mistry, Toll Brothers’ Houston division president.
“We’re trying to tie amenities to the natural environment,” he said.
In the Riverstone community in Fort Bend County, a 2-acre park has a log-stacked climbing pyramid and a 100-foot zip line. Two large trees that were removed to make room for the play equipment were used to make benches and stools throughout the park.
Potential cost savings
Playgrounds with natural elements offer a potential cost savings.
“You can create a hill for not very much money that’s pretty cool,” McCready said, “especially if you’re in a place that doesn’t have hills. For a jungle gym, you’re locked into a baseline cost.”
On a cost-per-square-foot basis, they tend to be cheaper, McCready added, though more maintenance is required during the life of the park. Several months after Exploration Park opened, for example, a stretch of grass along the side of a hill had been worn away by frequent use. Abox meant to hold paintbrushes for young children to “paint” the ground using a narrow stream of water was empty.
Buffalo Bayou Park includes a children’s play area with a rolling lawn, a stream and waterfall, climbing logs and stones, and a 33-foot slide built into a hill.
The elements offer different ways for kids to practice their motor skills while learning about nature.
“Getting away from more traditional play equipment is to really focus kids on engaging with the nuances of natural areas,” McCready said. “Decomposing wood, plants and flowers we don’t think of as play elements, but are pretty engaging to kids.”