An extraordinary find

Royce Daniels walked through the field of ankle-high grasses, weeds and flowers, rattling off names of plants for his boss, Harris County Precinct 1 County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. Wavy strands of little blue stem grass, fuzzy yellow goldenrod, fluffy purple Missouri iron-weed and a variety of milkweed pods are still hanging on.

Daniels, whose job as a field operations coordinator has him thinking about how to protect natural resources, quietly answers questions of Ellis, who at the same time is contemplating funding sources for the improvements they’ll need at this big find — 45 acres of previously undiscovered Gulf Coast native prairie, one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.

The land is at the Almeda School Road Nature Reserve — an unassuming park name that’s likely to change — in Precinct 1 on the edge of its border with the City of Pearland. It feels like the middle of nowhere, even if dozens of cars and trucks are zooming along the Sam Houston Tollway just a mile or so away.

Back in January last year, Daniels visited the various parks in the precinct to understand what they had. He walked the narrow, deep lot and wondered about the life and history of this land where nothing had ever been built.

Not long after, he attended a prairie restoration workshop in Goliad, where speakers reinforced that if you want to see what’s really on undisturbed land, just stop mowing. If and when flowers and other plants start blooming, you’ll know what you have.

They stopped mowing 10 acres of the site in March, and soon, magenta winecup flowers and deep green prairie parsley sprouted from the ground. When Texas coneflowers bloomed, Daniels got excited. No one has done anything at this site but mow for at least 30 years, and now, Gulf Coast prairie plants — more than 50 species in all — were coming up all on their own.

They’d hit the jackpot.

A little history

Centuries ago, the Texas Gulf Coast was populated by Attakapa, Akokisa and Karankawa Native Americans who lived off of the land. Before European settlers arrived, the area was filled with tall grasses and wildflowers that fed massive herds of bison and other wildlife that either lived on the prairie or migrated through.

There once was 9 million acres of coastal prairie from Brownsville north to Lafayette, La., but just 1% is left today. That’s 65,000 acres in Texas and a mere 100 acres in Louisiana.

It was a tidy ecosystem, with bison, birds and other animals devouring plants, then fertilizing the land as they redistributed seeds in a continuous cycle.

Today, there are no bison, red wolves are considered extinct in the wild, and you’ll rarely hear the high-pitched whistle of the bobwhite quail. The American alligator is a success story, though: once on the verge of extinction, the now protected reptile has made a comeback.

Many of the animals of our ecological heritage may be gone, but there’s one thing about the prairie that modern Gulf Coast residents can all embrace: its role in flood mitigation. With root systems that run 6 or more feet deep, patches of native prairie operate like giant sponges in times of heavy rains or flooding. The more water they can soak up and hold onto, the less water to damage homes and businesses. Prairie grasses also draw carbon dioxide from the air and hold it in the ground, helping improve the air naturally.

Their benefit became apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, when the City of Houston launched its comprehensive Resilient Houston program to be better prepared for climate change or future weather events.

At the same time, Memorial Park was in the middle of work on its master plan, which included the Kinder Land Bridge and the Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Prairie, a massive project that included the construction of east and west land bridges and 45 acres of newly planted native prairie. Other pocket parks and projects have installed native prairie, and two consecutive winter freezes have driven home the importance of native plants, prairie-specific or otherwise.

More recently, New Hope Housing, the nonprofit that builds housing for the homeless and those with very low income, this year added 8 acres of prairie to its Reed campus in the Sunnyside area, a site it operates with Star of Hope. The Star of Hope side has emergency shelter and transitional housing, while NHH offers one, two and three-bedroom apartments for formerly homeless or at-risk families.

Joy Horak-Brown, CEO of New Hope Housing, said that they had some unused land at the back of the property, and when they found out the city was looking for a Resilient Houston demonstration project, she and her team stepped up.

They offered up 8 acres and with funds from city and U.S. Fish and Wildlife plus their own private fund-raising, they collected most of the $900,000 it has taken to turn a depleted Settegast oil field and salt dome into native prairie teeming with grasses and wildflowers, some of which were harvested from a Texas Medical Center prairie plot that was dismantled to make way for a new building.

At Armand Bayou Nature Center, an urban wilderness with 900 acres of restored prairie in Clear Lake, executive director Tim Pylate is still raising funds to buy 1,000 acres of land from Exxon Mobil, land they plan to restore into Gulf Coast native prairie.

As an example of the growing importance of native plants, prairie or otherwise, Houston Wilderness is managing a project that will use the new Southeast Texas Native Seed Mix developed by Texas A&M-Kings-ville at the Rev. William and Audrey Lawson Park. It’s meant to be a demonstration site to show how the plants can promote water conservation and prevent erosion, and they hope they’ll be more folks interested in an eight-county area.

Gathering steam

When Daniels reported his discovery, he, Ellis and others from Precinct 1 rallied the troops, bringing in prairie experts such as Mary Anne Piacentini, president and CEO of the Coastal Prairie Conservancy; Don Verser, a volunteer heavily involved in the Deer Park Prairie; and Sarah Flournoy of the Houston Audubon Society.

“Finds like this are becoming rarer because so much of Houston and Harris County is developed. In all the land that we own — and we have 18,000 acres on the Katy prairie proper — we only have one remnant prairie and it’s 11 acres. This is a wonderful find,” said Piacentini.

With the prairie newly discovered and its first season of plants logged, planning for the site’s future is still very preliminary. Daniels noted that they’ve got to kill off invasives such as Chinese tallow and McCartney roses, do a soil survey, determine how much more of the site they’ll want to stop mowing and figure out which plants to add.

They’ll mow it in December and let it winter over to re-seed naturally, possibly even allowing a prescribed burn, one of Mother Nature’s favorite renewal efforts.

“I know that it is important and a good habitat. I went to the Coastal Prairie Conservancy and talked to as many people as I could and said ‘this is important, help me.’ The more people I show it to the more traction I am building,” Daniels said.

While prairie experts are putting together that plan, it’s Ellis’ job to finagle funding to do the work that’s sure to come. An avid cycler, Ellis took his bike to the property recently to ride back to the part they stopped mowing; he contemplated what it would take to put a walking/ biking trail through the site.

“We do have some money in the budget for restoration work, but we hope we can get the bulk of it in grants or partnerships. All of this work is expensive,” Ellis said. “The only reason this Almeda site happened the way it has is that it is one of the lesser-visited parks, right? A lot of parks, as soon as you stop mowing, people complain. It’s hard to do prairie restoration because people don’t understand that we’re not just neglecting a park.”

Ellis’ precinct has a good deal of park land, including El Franco Lee Park, Blue Ridge Park and Tom Bass Park, where they could find out-of-the-way sections to stop mowing to see if there are any latent seeds waiting to grow on their own, as they did at the Almeda School Road site.

“I went through and mapped out what could potentially be native prairie habitat, and it was 300 acres,” Daniels said. “We’re looking at land in the parks along Clear Creek. ... Precinct 1 has a lot of land.”