The drought has made the roads look bleak, but they will return to normal

“We’ve had a lot of rain this spring,” said Beeson, a landscape architect and arborist for TxDOT’s Houston area. “It was setting up to be a great growing season. Then it stopped and the temperature rose.”
Despite the recent rain, the roadsides remained brown and crunchy. Trees that should be green use more firewood than foliage. The grasses are burned, the soil shows signs of cracking, as the water leaves nothing but rocky dirt. Drought leaves small cracks, closer to desert landscapes than the greenery and mud of the gumbo of East Texas.
“In some places, it looks like a fire has come in,” said Tom Oliveira, 55, who lives near Jersey Village. “Everything seems dead.”

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However, Bisson is not sounding the alarm, noting that the 2011 drought was far more devastating than this year, and many of those plants have come back. However, he is still hoping for rain.
When trees and shrubs wither and die, or become a fire hazard in the summer, crews remove them. TxDOT typically has landscaping contracts with private companies, with those companies handling maintenance in certain sectors of Houston on an as-needed basis.
The lack of rain and a string of 100-plus degree days have changed what the crew does to keep the plants stable. Bison has halted additional plantings where construction is taking place, to spare new trees and refocus efforts on irrigation and preserving what is already in the ground.

“We’re trying to make sure these trees have the best chance of success,” he said.

Often times, trees fall into three categories, Beeson said, explaining their chances of dealing with something like a drought — or the hard freeze the area received more than two years ago. The new trees, which are less than three years old, are in fresh soil and still under the care of landscaping teams who monitor and water them regularly. Because of the extra care and attention needed to make sure they stay stable, those trees are doing well, Beeson said. The soil is not quite ideal next to the road, so they are covered with mulch and the top layer of the ground is often a 4 inch diameter layer of mulch meant to give them the air, water and sunlight they need to survive in those critical conditions for the first months.
Meanwhile, mature trees can survive drought because they have a head start on the richer soil buried deep down and the water stored in them. Older trees with more established root systems tend to survive — albeit with a loss of color and appearance — by preserving and hunkering down, Bisson said.
Those in the middle range of three to five — tree disciples — are the ones who suffer, Beeson said. They’ve outgrown the care and watering program TxDOT has been using for two years, but they’re not mature enough to take it on.
He added: “They have not reached that critical mass, and that is the challenge.”

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TxDOT operates, by many measures, the nation’s largest urban reforestation operation in the Houston area, planting 3 million trees over the past 25 years as part of the Green Ribbon program. However, they do so with the goal of making that canopy as maintenance-free as possible. Officials do not install permanent irrigation systems that are expensive and complex to maintain, and often only do so if a partner such as a local city or administrative district handles the landscaping of that area.

“It comes down to size and scope,” Bisson said. “We take care of them for two years to keep that growth going. Once that decade is up, you have to trust that Mother Nature will do her part.”
Officials must also balance tree health with road functionality, he said. The crew will continue to prune and trim to make the marks and turns more visible and reduce growth.
In some cases, these cuts have raised eyebrows. Some drivers were concerned when crews felled trees along Loop 610 in Bellaire, resulting in significant logging last month when temperatures were still topping 100 degrees.

“It appears they are reversing their significant investment to add green space to the highway rights-of-way,” Keith McAuliffe wrote in an email inquiring about the trimming.

TxDOT officials said the work is related to ongoing landscape maintenance along the western and southern portions of Loop 610, and along Interstate 45 south to Webster. Beeson said the trimming was appropriate for the site.
“In an ideal world, we would like to keep all the limbs on the trees,” he said, noting that the contractor has since refocused on irrigation and other maintenance. “But it’s still in the right direction that we need to pay attention to.”

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In order to operate mowing equipment and eliminate weeds and invasive plants, crews must be able to work under trees, Beeson explained. This requires, over time, removing low tree branches while preserving their tops.
Areas are also often cleared to reduce litter risks, and to clear areas that may be attractive to intruders looking for a place to pitch a tent or create a temporary shelter.
These projects cannot be postponed entirely due to the drought for several reasons, Bisson said.
“If you put a contractor out of business, there is some financial responsibility to stop them,” he said.