Not all of Texas is a flat, ugly, boring brown wasteland in the dead of Winter...

[Gunion Powder]

Originally Posted by radiolibre99

It would be nice for Houston to plant more palms trees around the city.

Only the local types should be planted, in my opinion. The one and only exception would probably be the date palms, since they do so well here. Queen palms are nice but don't suit Houston as well as they do Miami.

Washingtonias grow to incredible heights but are a desert palm and simply shouldn't be in Houston.

[I Love Buildings]

Houston would be more hip if it had some hiking mountains. Also more coastal metros.

[DanielWayne]

We'll get Kirk and Spock to commandeer a Klingon Bird-of-Prey and drop off a few humpback whales into Galveston Bay while we are at it. Whales are really hip.

[TheOverdog]

Am I the only one who does not like palm trees? They give off no shade and take a lot maintance when they get tall and need clipping.

I don't think highly of them as trees, but as architectural embellishments where the average house is 30 feet tall and less, a towering 60 plus foot tree looks pretty nice. And they have nice straight tall trunks so that if they are planned well they look like soldiers or towers or something lined up in formations. Many pine trees also look great architecturally.

As useful trees, oaks and the like are better.

[DigitalCircuit]

The Gulf Coast of Texas, along with southern areas of the state, are quite green during winter. While decidious trees still exist, these areas represent the part of the state where superfluous broad-leaf evergreen flora start thriving. The RGV has palm-tree jungles, for instance, while areas outside Lake Jackson basically have forest of live oak draping with spanish moss (a classic Deep South scene).

[podunkETX]

This year there wasn't much of a dead period in deep/south ETX.

[DigitalCircuit]

Originally Posted by podunkETX

This year there wasn't much of a dead period in deep/south ETX.

There never normally is either; plentiful evergreen flora is native to those parts of Texas, so the landscape still looks relatively alive even in a cold winter.

Even the deciduous forest areas can look alive if they have a thick enough subtropical under-story (i.e. full of palmetto, evergreen lianas, small trees like hollies and bays, etc).

[podunkETX]

Looks pretty dead in the customary plotted pine plantations and pastures. We have some invasive Chinese privet that waits until late Fall to bloom though, really need to drop a match to that stuff.

[DigitalCircuit]

Originally Posted by podunkETX

Looks pretty dead in the customary plotted pine plantations and pastures. We have some invasive Chinese privet that waits until late Fall to bloom though, really need to drop a match to that stuff.

It depends on where you are; certain sections of the ecosystem happen to be dominated by deciduous plants, and thus, can look dead during winter. Other sections are dominated by loads of evergreen plants (the pine forests have evergreens like red bay, southern magnolia, hollies, etc growing within); such evergreen sections tend to be in areas with nutrient poor, leached acidic soils, since they can afford to grow in such soils (they don't need nutrients like decidious trees, which have to expend energy in annual leaf loss, growth cycles).

Pine plantations are not natural, just plots with pine trees; you, thus, don't have a natural under-story growing, making things look empty.

But, even though there are deciduous trees in the landscape, I don't consider the landscape of southern/coastal Texas dead, because there are usually enough superfluous, thriving evergreens to keep things green enough year-round, from the nigh tropic landscape in the RGV, to the Deep South coastal feel of the northern Texas Gulf.