Playscape opens at Houston Arboretum
Children scamper across the new playground at the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center, giggling and climbing a sturdy cable “spider web” or making their way up tree stumps to a wooden “hawk’s nest.”
A newly opened imaginative playscape at the Nature Center, which started fund raising in 2012 and construction in 2017, makes the park more accessible and resilient for the 500,000 visitors it sees annually.
The playscape is just under an acre and is geared to nature play rather than conventional playground equipment.
A cable “spider’s web” that mimics rope allows kids to use their imagination to pretend they’re catching bugs, and a “grass climb” of metal spikes painted green with stepping pads allows children to act like grasshoppers, climbing from blade to blade.
A new balancing bridge is much more stable, allowing kids to hang onto the sides and walk across on planks. Toddlers get some love, too, with a big sandbox and an area called “Flower Fun” that allows younger children to climb a structure that looks like flower petals.
The park, on Woodway across from Memorial Park, had suffered significant damage in Hurricane Ike in the fall of 2008 and then the severe drought in 2011, losing half of its tree canopy between those two weather events.
Park managers assessed what remained and realized that though the park was originally a grassy prairie, it had evolved into something else over the decades since it opened in 1967.
“Land can adapt to how we use it, but ultimately it tells you what it wants to be,” Christine Mansfield, senior manager of marketing and development at the nature center, said of the 155-acre park.
Invasive species such as native yaupon holly and Chinese privet (also called Chinese ligustrum)
had taken hold and taken over.
“A lot of the park, historically, would have supported prairie and savanna ecosystems like much of Houston,” Mansfield said. “In the absence of natural checks and balances — grazers such as bison or wildfires, which happen every
one to five years, historically — without those, nature progresses along, and the natural progression is from prairie to forest.”
For the past several years, park managers have worked to restore more of the land to its natural state, adding back prairie grasses
rather than more trees. That was part of a master plan and fundraising that began in 2012 to precede the actual work that finished recently with the opening of the children’s play park.
Overall, the one building that was on site includes the original Nature Center, which has been remodeled into a shop, classrooms and interactive exhibit. Park managers added an administrative building for the staff and the park’s many volunteers, plus another building for the conservation team and its tools.
All of it was supported by a fundraising campaign that raised $25.8 million.
Park organizers essentially reworked one-third of the park’s 155 acres, Mansfield said, including making one mile of its many trails ADA accessible. That included a reworked entrance on Woodway and a brand-new entrance off of the Loop 610 feeder road. Parking was added at both entrances, tripling what used to be there.
Before, the park had a small meadow, but the weather events removed so many trees that planners could evaluate a whole new use and new ecosystem. They decided to return some 17 acres to prairie grassses while removing dead or dying trees as well as a few healthy ones. (Not to worry; the city keeps track of tree removal, and the grasses offset the trees to the point that the park has a “tree credit,” Mansfield said.)
“The meadow was the inspiration for it all because it fared well during Ike and the drought and could deal with natural disasters, be it a lot of water or not enough water,” Mansfield said.
Walking trails have been restored, too, after being closed off and on for about a decade. Storms and flooding would wash out teaching platforms and bridges — at one point, park staff even had to deal with a sinkhole.
Mansfield said that they moved bridges to better places and elevated them to avoid future problems. They added mulch to the trails so it’s easier to replace if it washes out again.
“Houston is a city that will always flood. We want to work with that, not against it,” Mansfield said.
The park urges visitors to stay on the trails, Mansfield said. It is a nature park, and snakes — some of them poisonous — have chosen to live there, too.