Encourage more Prairie Restorations; Thank Arlington, TX Leaders for Past Projects

Dear Ms. Dowell,

I want to thank you and the City of Arlington for your innovation and successful installation of the beautiful prairie restoration site in the 800 block of North Cooper Street, on the west side right of way, and just south of Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital.

The approximate 2 acre prairie restoration is the kind of planting we need in urban spaces to fulfill the needs of wildlife, pollinators, and also our human needs. The restoration of native wildflowers and grasses is critically needed since 95% of all natural space in the lower 48 continental United States has been transformed into cities, suburbs and agricultural lands, leaving a tiny remnant of natural spaces. Only native plants can create native habitats which are essential to all forms of life, including humans, through the biodiversity they support.

I appreciate creative land managers like you demonstrating, to those who live and work in Arlington and other cities’ leaders, the restoration of missing native habitats that are rapidly destroyed and lost due to population growth. With more sites like this, we can see and appreciate an example of what the Native Americans tribes in the area may have seen, i.e., the immense natural beauty of the local prairies and cross timbers forest, defining the sense of place through the unique plants native to this local region.

The Arlington Parks and Recreation Department has done a good job in their extensive use of native plants in landscaping around municipal buildings. As a result, their application of responsible water wise practices, including drip irrigation, is appreciated.

With those successes, I want to bring attention to the prairie restoration site as another model of this sustainable landscape practice that should be used more frequently. We must use more native plants, especially in this style of planting, which mimics the original landscape with tall prairie wildflowers and grasses allowed to grow, re-seed and re-generate the next year’s growth without being regularly mowed.

These native plants are providing essential ecosystem services, including slowing storm water runoff, filtering rainwater / recharging the Trinity underground aquifer, protecting against soil erosion, filtering air and sequestering carbon, reducing the heat sink effect of cities’ buildings, roads, and parking lots, and providing habitat for wildlife and pollinators.

Prairie restoration sites like this one also require infrequent mowing (just enough to control invasives and other woody species), which results in less air pollution from mowing equipment, especially during the metroplex’s high ozone days during the summer. Finally, with the density and variety of native plantings in the prairie restoration landscape, there are two other important benefits.

First, there is a greater quantity of plants and appropriate types of native plants available to support wildlife, especially pollinators, which are in significant decline due to habitat loss.

Second, there are fewer opportunities for weeds like Johnson grass and other invasive plants to become a maintenance nuisance. By restoring the prairie, you have created the most highly sustainable landscape for this site and taken an important step towards creating a sustainable living community that benefits us all.

I commend and thank you for your efforts on this project and encourage you and others to install more prairie restorations to other city owned land, either in right of ways, in sections of city park lands, in city golf courses, and surrounding other city facilities.

The undersigned parties have joined in this letter to also express their appreciation of this site and desire for additional urban prairie restoration sites using native plants in the near future.