Conservation and Landscaping
Exploration Green has been designed to strategically improve the return the space to a more natural state, what one former board member called “un-development.”
Conservancy experts, award-winning design organizations and citizen volunteers have all come together to create the Clear lake City Water Authority’s (CLCWA’s) Exploration Green Master Plan. SWA Group (Houston’s award-winning landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm with projects at Buffalo Bayou and Hermann Park) has applied advanced design approaches to citizen input to create the project’s master plan with numerous conservation elements.
Galveston Bay Foundation, (GBF) the premiere environmental organization in the Bay Area, is a key partner of the Exploration Green project. GBF holds a conservation easement on the Exploration Green property. The conservation easement is a legal document that prevents future development of the property forever and will ensure an environmentally sound approach to the area, now and in the future.
Native Trees
Wildlife habitat is being expanded by planting native trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that support a wide variety of existing, new resident and migrating birds and butterflies.
Trees are truly a special feature of the Exploration Green today and even more so in the future. The Clear Lake City Water Authority (CLCWA) is working to save as many of the old growth trees as practical as the stormwater detention lake excavation progresses.
Other trees originally planted on the golf course fairways for aesthetics that are now considered invasive species, such as Chinese tallow, are being removed.
The CLCWA and Exploration Green Conservancy have developed a partnership with Trees for Houston, a non-profit dedicated to urban forestry. Trees for Houston has committed to donate 1,000 native trees for each of the five phases, 5,000 trees total.
The small donated trees enter the onsite tree nursery, where Exploration Green volunteers care for them and “up-pot” them from 5-gallon pots to 10-gallon pots, then to 15-gallon pots, and so on until they are ready to be transplanted onto the Exploration Green property.