Landscape

Landscape
11/07/11 10:35am

Urban Escape: An ExxonMobil Video Tour and Explanation for Its Enormous New Houston Forest Campus

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Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Spring, Springwoods Village
32 Comments

Yes, ExxonMobil “values the environment.” That’s why the company is building this 385-acre pedestrian-friendly campus with an “urban vibe” — in the middle of the forest 20 miles north of Houston.

Video: ExxonMobil, via Loren Steffy

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Gardening
10/31/11 12:05pm

A Bigger and More Automated Greenhouse for Memorial Park

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Landscape, Memorial Park, Openings and Closings, Public Buildings
4 Comments

The original greenhouse in Memorial Park — birthplace of thousands of plants sent regularly to city properties around town — lasted from 1946 until 3 years ago, though it was in bad shape even before Hurricane Ike blew away the makeshift plastic put in place of some missing windows. The new greenhouse — designed by local landscape architecture firm Clark Condon Associates, opened officially late last week, and paid for in part with federal hurricane-recovery funds — measures 8,600 sq. ft. and includes a cistern and automated watering and shading systems. A separate headhouse was also renovated as part of the project, and a brand-new prefab restroom set up nearby.

Photo: KUHF News

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Comments
10/25/11 10:00pm

Comment of the Day Runner-Up: Sowing Sprawl

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Landscape, Quicklink, Sprawl, Strip Centers
2 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: SOWING SPRAWL “Then the birds fly over the empty dirt and drop seeds for nail salons, cell phone accessory stores and quickie loan dives. The city would have to plant chinaberry trees to protect it.” [Hellsing, commenting on Mayor Parker Wants To Buy Unused Eastwood Elementary School on Credit]

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Art
10/13/11 2:11pm

I’ll Have a Giant Ragweed To Go, Please

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Bayous and Waterways, Landscape
4 Comments

Making its debut last night at the Sabine Promenade downtown: The Buffalo Bayou Invasive Plant Eradication Unit, equipped with gardening tools, microscopes and plant presses, and a taco-truck style ordering counter where you can report or learn about the latest local vegetation battles. The food-truck-style mobile exhibit and lab is the work of New York artist Mark Dion, commissioned by the Houston Arts Alliance and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. Next stops: the Holly Hall Retirement Community Plant and Bulb Mart at 2000 Holly Hall St. (on Friday) and the Native Plant Symposium at the Omni Hotel at Eldridge Parkway and the Katy Freeway (Saturday). Look for the converted Ford van with the skull and crossed pitchfork and shovel.

Photo: Meredith Deliso

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Landscape
09/29/11 8:56am

City To Crack Down on “Litter on a Stick”; Dick Snaps Back

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Signs, Streetscapes
17 Comments

In time for campaign season, Mayor Parker announced yesterday that the city would begin cracking down on bandit signs placed on public property by fining violators under an existing city ordinance that — as far as she knows — has never been enforced. Political candidates will be given 24 hours’ notice for each violation before being charged $200 a pop, she said. Collected funds will be used to defray the cost of removing the signs — which reached $450,000 in 2009.

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Development Strategies
09/12/11 9:49am

This Week, Houston Begins Slicing What’s Left of the Katy Prairie in Two

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Freeways and Toll Roads, Landscape, New Construction, Sprawl
19 Comments

Tuesday morning, not far from the former grounds of Forbidden Gardens, its now-ransacked replica gravesite of Emperor Qin, and his army of one-third-scale terracotta soldiers at the stub-end of Hwy. 99 and Franz Rd., TxDOT and a contingent of public officials will gather to celebrate the groundbreaking of a notable project for Houston: the paving of a $350 million four-lane toll highway with “intermittent” development-ready access roads across an expanse of largely uninhabited prairie land that stretches between Katy and Cypress. When it’s complete, the 180-mile-long Grand Parkway will be Houston’s fourth ring road, cutting through 7 different counties. But none of the planned segments will forge so dramatic a path through undeveloped land as this particular north-south stretch, called Segment E.

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Landscape
09/07/11 9:03am

Accounting for All Those Overzealous Dick Sign Posters

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Quicklink, Streetscapes
25 Comments

ACCOUNTING FOR ALL THOSE OVERZEALOUS DICK SIGN POSTERS Political consultant and bandit-sign monitor Greg Wythe digs into campaign filings to assess a recent claim by at-large city council candidate Eric Dick — that many of the ubiquitous and often illegally posted signs advertising his candidacy throughout Houston are the work of “overzealous volunteers.” Wythe’s findings: At a sign distribution meeting held at the Captain Benny’s at 10896 Northwest Fwy. just south of 34th St. in mid-May, Dick’s campaign shelled out a whopping $22.36 to feed the overzealous crowd. But payments to a company hired to distribute the campaign’s signs amount to more than $5,000. [Greg’s Opinion; background; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Empty Lot Primary

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Disaster Aftermath
09/01/11 1:29pm

Houston Tree Massacre Body Count

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Landscape, Memorial Park, Quicklink, Trees
14 Comments

HOUSTON TREE MASSACRE BODY COUNT For full effect, Trees for Houston executive director Barry Ward counts the number of local trees expected to die and be removed over the next 2 years because of the recent drought: 66 million. (Okay, but how many of them will we get to carve up for mermaid and doggie sculptures?) That’s 10 percent of the greater Houston area’s branch-bearing population right there. At Memorial Park, 400 of approximately 1,000 close-to-dead trees have already been removed. More fun urban deforesting facts: Already, more trees have been destroyed by the drought than by Hurricane Ike. [Culturemap; watering hints] Photo: Houston Tomorrow

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Humble
08/30/11 12:20pm

What Now Passes for Waterfront Property on Lake Houston

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Kings River Estates, Lake Houston, Lakes, Landscape, Lawn Care
No Comments

Drought has turned land that used to be part of Lake Houston into a jungle of 14-ft.-tall snake-infested weeds. Waterfront residents of Kings River Village, near the northern end of the lake in Humble, would like to knock down the vegetation that’s sprung up as the lake has receded, and that now surrounds their newly dry backyard docks. But some are proceeding with caution because they don’t own the newfound land and are wary of legal and ecological issues that might result from clear-cutting the newly exposed wetlands. “Right now, we are just in a situation where our kids can’t go back anywhere near the lake because of the weeds and the snakes that are back there,” Clear Sky Dr. resident David Labbe tells the Lake Houston Observer. “We’ve seen an abundance of snakes. We don’t know what rights we have, as homeowners, to go out there and try to remedy the situation.” Labbe has contacted the Army Corps of Engineers, the San Jacinto River Authority, and Houston officials, but hasn’t received an answer yet.

Photo: Stephen Thomas/Lake Houston Observer

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Critters
08/08/11 4:49pm

Here Come the Pork Choppers

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Landscape, Quicklink
12 Comments

HERE COME THE PORK CHOPPERS After 4 hours of classroom training near Hobby Airport in “the first Professional Helicopter Hog Hunting Safety Course in the nation that is specific to hunters who would be hiring a helicopter service to hunt feral hogs,” reporter Sonia Smith goes out on her first aerial wild hog shoot, AR-15 in hand — near Knox City, with the same helicopter pilot who took Ted Nugent on a 30-plus pig run back in March. A new law effective September 1 allows sport hunters to rent helicopter gunner seats for hog or coyote kills, but the rush has already begun. Cedar Ridge Aviation’s Dustin Johnson tells her he’s scheduled 30 flights so far, “including one for a group of ATF agents from New York.” [Texas Monthly; course info; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Cedar Ridge Aviation

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Landscape
08/05/11 12:06pm

Ben Franklin Didn’t Mess with Texas

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4 Comments

Sure, Benjamin Franklin started the whole Chinese tallow tree thing in the U.S. when he sent a few seeds to friends in Georgia in 1772. But don’t blame him for the great Gulf Coast tallow invasion. Rice professor Evan Siemann and 2 other researchers found that the tallow trees crowding out what’s left of coastal prairie grassland from Florida to East Texas didn’t come from the seeds Franklin sent. The descendants of Franklin’s gift have stuck around an area of northern Georgia and southern South Carolina, according to genetic tests. Other tests traced the problem-causing tallows to seeds brought to the U.S. a little more than 100 years ago, likely from around Shanghai, by federal biologists.

The researchers also brought samples of the these trees back to China, and in controlled tests found the U.S. trees grew and spread much faster than the Chinese trees they descended from.

Video: Rice University

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Critters
08/01/11 1:42pm

For the Glory of Old Navy: Purple Martins’ Majesty Meets 59 Feeder Road Shopping Center Parking Lot

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Fort Bend County, Landscape, Parking, Stafford
8 Comments

An enormous flock of Purple Martins has gathered in and around the parking lot of the Fountains Shopping Center facing the Southwest Freeway in Stafford, where they’ve taken up a noisy nighttime roost on nearby power lines and the allée of oak trees that leads through the concrete expanse to Rack Room Shoes and Old Navy. This is likely the same group that hung out in Sharpstown or the eastside KBR campus in previous years, on its way to Brazil; it appears to be the birds’ first window-shopping experience at Mattress Giant.

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Gardening
06/29/11 12:42pm

Where the Grass Is Always Neater

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Houston History, Landscape, Quicklink
5 Comments

WHERE THE GRASS IS ALWAYS NEATER “I used to walk to school everyday and I used to pass by the home of the richest man in the area and he had a square block that was magnificently trimmed at all times and in the back of my mind subconsciously I considered a lawn like that as ‘success.’ So when I bought me a big house here in Houston the weeds were growing all around my trees and everything and i couldn’t get anybody to do it. Finally I found somebody that’d do it and he reached down into the grass and he got bit by a snake and I spent the rest of my day trying to save his life rather than get my yard done.” — dance instructor George Ballas, inventor of the Weed Eater, who passed away over the weekend at age 85. Ballas came up with the idea for his transformative product after watching spinning bristles clean his Cadillac at a car wash near Houston International (now Hobby) Airport. Until he sold the company to Emerson Electric, the company’s worldwide headquarters stood at 10515 Harwin. The company got a major boost from commercials shown during David Frost’s interviews with former president Richard Nixon in 1977. [Business Makers; obituary] Photo of Ballas’s West Houston lawn: Corky and Shirley Ballas

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Landscape
06/15/11 4:26pm

West U Fruit Surveillance Now in Place for Another Season

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Security, Signs, Trees, West University
17 Comments

It’s just about summertime, and all you fans of fresh West University produce know what that means: Yes, it’s well past time to set up those security cameras to monitor your vulnerable front-yard fruits. “The camera and fruit-thief deterrent signs have returned,” notes the reader who sent in these photos of this ripe “either peach or nectarine” tree on Tangley, west of Buffalo Speedway. But the security effort actually appears to be a bit more subdued than last year. The bilingual warning signage featured on the tree and a few of its neighbors last season has been replaced with a smaller and simpler handwritten “Camera” warning.

Swamplot’s West U fruit scout says there’s another sign on the other side of the tree “that says something like ‘Don’t even think about it.’” No photo of that? Explains the source: “I was in a hurry and, of course, wanting to stay out of the camera’s wily view.”

Photos: Swamplot inbox

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Comments
06/09/11 11:14pm

Comment of the Day: You Go to Work with the Sprawl You Have, Not the City You Might Want or Wish To Have at a Later Time

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Landscape, Office Space, Quicklink, Sprawl, Spring, Springwoods Village
19 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOU GO TO WORK WITH THE SPRAWL YOU HAVE, NOT THE CITY YOU MIGHT WANT OR WISH TO HAVE AT A LATER TIME “. . . The ExxonMobil development is right in between The Woodlands and Spring. Residents of these communities would cut 30-80 minutes off their round trip commute by working at the new facility versus going downtown. That is a very significant reduction in smog forming vehicle emissions. If a business doesn’t need to be in Houston’s central business district, then it is actually better to have them build closer to the work force than to cram more people on the highway for longer commutes. You can’t beat sprawl that is already here. The best you can do is mitigate it by creating smaller city centers in places like The Woodlands, Sugar Land and Clear Lake.” [Old school, commenting on Comment of the Day: ExxonMobil Takes the Forest]

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