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"There's a moment where you hold hands with history." — Thomas Woltz "Memorial Groves will highlight a piece of Houston's World War I-era history that has been under-told and is at risk of being forgotten." The Quiet Place If the Land Bridge, the Eastern Glades and prairie projects are the dramatic showpieces of the groundbreaking Memorial Park transformation, the new 100-acre Memorial Groves promises to be something quieter and more solemn. Picture a cathedral of trees transforming a neglected, almost forgotten strip of the massive park, running from West Memorial Loop to the railroad tracks. Research, much of it led by a cultural advisory group helmed by Memorial Park Conservancy president emeritus Shellye Arnold, revealed this dismissed and almost discarded strip carries historical significance. That rail line connected Camp Logan to the rest of the world. It's where soldiers arrived to drill and where they were eventually sent off to war, the opening steps in their journey to the front line in France. This is where Woltz and his team would plant trees 16 feet apart, a standard forestry practice that almost eerily channels the spacing used in military regiments — six-men tents set 10 feet apart. Acres of newly planted cypress trees (more than 2,000 cypress overall) and acres of interplanted trees now accompany the few trees on this stretch that survived a devastating drought. The new Memorial Groves also pays homage to the trench warfare that made World War I so claustrophobic and bloody. The soldiers at Camp Logan tirelessly trained to build the 12-foot-deep trenches with benches and sloped sides that they would later construct under duress in Europe. Early on, Woltz realized that digging down 12 feet was neither practical nor fitting for a place meant for meditation. He would flip the script and turn the idea right side up. "What if we reimagined the trench?" he says. "Instead of digging down 12 feet, we could build up 12 feet." Twelve-foot-high earthen mounds will create a long rectangular space with trees inside and a 50-foot-long This page: Rendering of Thomas Woltz's new Memorial Groves. Camp Logan tent rows, 1917. Opposite page, from top: Memorial Groves conceptual rendering. Camp Logan, 1917. table with an inch of water on it meant to connect the sky to the ground. It will be a place for reflection and, Woltz hopes, one of the more beautiful places in all Memorial Park. Here, nature will be allowed to star. Woltz often looks like he stepped straight out of the pages of GQ, with his perfectly coiffed gray hair and Thom Browne suit. He never seems rustled, even as he charges up a hill. And it's true that this versatile 58-year- old charms at dinner parties with an easy grace and authority. It's no stretch to suggest he's the first celebrity landscape architect. But at the heart of it, he remains the boy raised on a cattle farm in Mount Airy, North Carolina, who wants to meet nature on its terms. "A prairie esta- blishment is a rough- looking process," Woltz says. "To the eye of someone who loves golf, a prairie looks like abandoned land or rough land. To an ecologist, it looks like a healthy, fertile, stable ecosystem that can tolerate fire and drought. To me, I look at a prairie and think, 'That's a superhero right there. That's an incredibly strong and resistant living thing. Full of birds and wildlife.'" When Nature Wins Woltz sees Memorial Groves as the next step forward, one that harkens back to the park's forgotten original purpose — what Will and Mike Hogg imagined when they sold the land for Memorial Park to the City of Houston at cost. Now there will be a new playground, workout areas meant to mimic the training the Camp Logan soldiers went through, a "day in the lives of the soldiers" exhibit, acknowledgments of the virulent racial abuse that the soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment endured in Houston, and biking and hiking trails. To Woltz, it's about being there as much as anything — hearing and seeing the trains, taking in the natural surroundings and those young trees. "There's a moment where you hold hands with history," he says. Maybe a moment w h e re M e m o r i a l Park's longtime name suddenly carries more weight and meaning. NELSON BYRD WOLTZ NATIONAL ARCHIVES 69