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M emorial Park never lived up to its name, even as it became the anchor of so much in Houston life. "The park was always called Memorial Park, but few people knew why," says Thomas Woltz, the landscape architect who's redefining what memorial means. Spend any time around Woltz — who always seems to be moving, bounding here or there, sending a torrent of measured but urgent thoughts your way — and one quickly realizes this is someone who always wants to Famed landscape architect Thomas Woltz is putting the memorial into Houston's Memorial Park with the latest ambitious project, reimagining restoration of Houston's largest public green space. The new Memorial Groves honors the oft-forgotten Camp Logan, a massive World War I training ground in the rugged wilderness of 1917 Houston, while also nodding to nature with a forest of young trees. This $42 million addition to Memorial Park will be a living testament to sacrifice and the wild natural beauty that Woltz has been preaching. know the why. Before you can listen to the land and the trees, you need to truly grasp the history. Before you can dig into the dirt, you need the dirt on what actually happened. Houston's mammoth urban park does not carry the famous ghosts of one of Woltz's other grand restoration projects — the grounds of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Memorial Park's stories are less known; but no less important or weighted, in Woltz's view. Memorial Park came to be in 1924, centered around the idea of honoring the 70,000 soldiers who trained at Camp Logan for World War I on what would become park grounds. Now, more than a century later, the memorial of Memorial Park is finally happening — part of the Memorial Park Master Plan that's reimagining the largest public green space in Houston, a sprawling swath of land nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. There will be no paved plaza or heroic figures frozen in stone. Woltz and his firm, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, conjured something much more organic, a living memorial to those young men who sacrificed and lost their lives in the savage combat of what historians somewhat callously deem The Great War. Those fragile lives will be represented by trees — one of Houston's most breakable, precious, and priceless resources. "The average age of the soldier killed in World War I was 24," Woltz says. "It was a very young war. And so we thought planting a memorial and watching it grow might even be, for the early years, a reminder of the youthfulness." The $42 million Memorial Groves project is being powered forward by donations from the Kinder Foundation ($10 million); businessman, philanthropist, and American history preservationist John L. Nau III ($7.5 million) and the Brown Foundation ($7.5 million). "What excites us," says Nancy Kinder, "is that Memorial Groves will remind visitors why this park is called Memorial Park." Nau, who is considered the top collector of Civil War artifacts in the world, says, Speaking With the Trees By Chris Baldwin NELSON BYRD WOLTZ NATIONAL ARCHIVES 68