Houston’s pocket prairies: Natural solutions to unnatural flooding

Deep in the heart of the dense steel and glass jungle of Houston’s Medical Center district, you can catch glimpses of what the city looked like some 400 years ago.

Tall grasses rise up from one corner, sheltering more than 70 different plant and flower species. It looks messy, swampy, and wild – especially compared to the pristine grass lawns that surround many Houston buildings. It looks like coastal prairie.

Prairie like this covered coastal Texas and Louisiana for centuries, stretching from modern-day New Orleans all the way to Corpus Christi. Covering 9 million acres and supporting iconic flora and fauna like bluebonnets, monarch butterflies, and longhorn cattle, it evolved to survive, and thrive, in a corner of the world subject to both frequent flooding and drought.

The prairie couldn’t survive the growth of cities and agriculture, however, and today less than 1% of the original coastal ecosystem remains. But as the region has experienced four “500 year” rain events in the past five years – including this month’s Tropical Storm Imelda – a prairie renaissance has been blossoming in Houston…

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