Houston Chronicle

Mud makes a comeback in suburbia By Dylan Baddour May 29, 2017 Generations ago, vast swaths of wetlands were tilled for space to grow rice, and a few generations later those rice fields were turned into posh sprawling suburbs, like Riverstone in Sugar Land. Such subdivisions have typically prided themselves on clean streets, neatly trimmed lawns, white concrete sidewalks and a neighborhood pool. Now comes Meade Mitchell, a landscape architect with TBG Partners, leading the design for a place to get dirty in suburbia with an intentionally rugged wetlands "adventure" park in Riverstone. "Engaging with nature is a huge rediscovery. It's definitely something builders are focused on," Mitchell said. "There is an amenity there in nature, and it's not that expensive to set the table for nature to reintroduce itself." Developers cited the marketing of natural beauty as an amenity as a rising trend in subdivision designs that once were known for sterile tidiness. Mitchell calls it "authenticity of land," a heightened emphasis on emblems of natural heritage. It's cheaper than building golf courses and it doubles as an important feature for flood mitigation and stormwater treatment. The new interactive wetland park started with a legal requirement to replace 4.5 acres of wetlands and Mitchell's own nostalgia for his childhood days wading a creek barefoot until called home for dinner. Similar sentiments are driving a turn back toward natural roughness. "If you ask residents what their preferences are, connecting back to nature is always at the very top of the chart," said Doug Goff, president of Johnson Development. "People don't want golf courses anymore." He pointed to other Johnson projects like Harvest Green, a neighborhood with a 300-acre working farm, or Cross Creek Ranch, a community in Fulshear with wild prairie grass and marshy ponds. That mirrors a trend in local public spaces, said Rebecca Martinez, conservation director for the Bayou Land Conservancy, where green spaces and even wet spaces have been turned into community amenities. Improvements to Buffalo Bayou, for example, have made it a prime attraction in central Houston. "I feel like people have reawakened to the idea that it's nice to disconnect and walk outside and see trees and hear birds," Martinez said. "And to understand our natural history of Houston. We're low and we're flat and we have lots of bayous so that means we have lots of wetlands." Wetlands once covered this landscape before nearly 200 years of development buried much of them beneath millions of acres of concrete. The authentic Houston experience was not lost on early settlers here, from O.F. Allen who wrote that "the southwestern portion of the city was a green scum lake" in the 1840s, to German explorer Ferdinand Roemer, who reported stopping to dismantle and dislodge his wagon five times a day thanks to "bottomless black mud" on the road from Houston to Fort Bend. "Hardly had we left the city when the flat Houston prairie loomed up as an endless swamp. Large puddles of water followed one another and at several places a large section of land was underwater," he wrote.

Most of that landscape is gone, and with it went important functions like trapping big rains, cleaning stormwater and providing refuge for the local birds. Federal regulations require developers to preserve or replace wetlands where they are lost to new neighborhoods, but those regulations have been substantially weakened in recent years, according to Bruce Bodson, an attorney and executive director of Galveston Baykeeper. Wetlands are protected only if they have a connection to water bodies deemed navigable by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That leaves out a lot of the wetlands in the local prairies, Bodson said. "Developers can pretty much fill them with impunity in a lot of places," he said. The idea for the Riverstone park was sparked in part by the need to replace wetlands lost to development, but Mitchell also saw it as an opportunity to re-create the kind of spaces he enjoyed as a child but that his own children forgo in favor of weekends and evenings online. Mitchell understands they don't have the places to explore like he had. "There's not much natural area left," he said, pointing to the sprawl of streets and homes. He hoped the park could serve as an intermediary step between the TV and the wild woods for children of the digital age. So the design team with TBG designed a mud pie kitchen, and put targets in the ponds to entice kids to throw rocks. The bridge has no handrails in an intentional attempt to get kids on their bellies as they gaze at the minnows. Trees cleared from local lots have been cast into the shallow water to re-create a woody swamp, and there's a pathway of partly submerged rocks that will force kids to get their feet wet. Eventually this marsh will be self-sustaining, drying and filling back up with rain. Mitchell imagines it becoming a real sanctuary for local fish and frogs and birds and more. His dream of creating an authentic wetlands will be realized, he said, when the first alligator moves in.