On Friday, September 27, a group of volunteers from Westbury met the Houston Wilderness staff at an empty lot on Cartagena Street. The lot was purchased by the city after Hurricane Harvey and had already been excavated to produce a shallow ditch to drain stormwater from the street into the Willow Waterhole Bayou.
Houston Wilderness provided hundreds of native grass and wildflower seedlings for planting in the bottom of the swale. Planting long-rooted native prairie grass is a good strategy for slowing and resorbing the water as it moves through the swale.
It will be interesting to see what this re-wilded space looks like after a season of growth.
There are several more vacant lots in between homes near the Willow Waterhole Bayou that will be channeled and planted in a similar way.