Why Aren't There More Tree/Green in Dallas Compare to Houston???? (El Paso: live, club)

[Metro Matt]

Originally Posted by Mister Nifty

I can remember reading about zoologists, treeologists, or whomever, stumbling across a virgin forest somewhere in Dallas county. This meant it existed in such a way as to never be manipulated by mankind. This means trees did exist in Dallas county even before mankind started planting groves of them.
In regards to Houston, if you desire to know what the city looked like prior to people planting a lot of trees in the area, then pay a visit into all those reservoirs built in the western part of the city. My friends and I, when we were teenagers, used to drive into this area as they kept them empty to catch as much flood water as possible.
The indegenous plants of the marshy and swampy Houston were quite ugly.

The high humidity of Houston makes for a pretty green city. You definitely know you're in the Deep South when you see Spanish Moss draping from the limbs of trees older than the city itself.

Houston is only marshy on the far eastern side of the city headed towards Louisiana. The western side is flat coastal plains & the Katy Prairie. Northern Houston is in the Piney Woods region though you do find large groves of pine trees as far south as Clear Lake near NASA.

Both Houston & Dallas have the flood plains you are referring to. Ever heard of the Trinity River near Downtown Dallas?

[TowerGuy]

HAHA! Perspective is a neat thing isn't it? I am from a desert region in California so to hear people talk about Dallas as not real green is something else. Where I lived 12 inches of annual rainfall was considered an exceptionally wet year.

[houstonboi22]

Originally Posted by Metro Matt

Just that.

Dallas (North Texas) gets less rain than Houston (Gulf Coast/Southeast Texas) & has a different kind of soil not conducive to growing tall pine trees.

They're in two completely separate regions & climates. For example, most tropical vegetation & palm trees won't survive the harsh Dallas winters. Rarely, though there are exceptions (last winter) does it ever get below freezing down in Houston where in Dallas it can dip down into the teens for days, even weeks at at time.

no...it may get a F or 2F above freezing for a couple of days...but unless you are in the northern part of the houston metro...temps rarely get to freezing and in galveston it WONT reach freezing for a decade!

[Northanna_2001]

Originally Posted by feufoma

Central Dallas (and Fort Worth) have great trees! Sure, the burbs are more "native" prairie, but there are parts of DFW that have a nice canopy. Houston's climate is, however, much more suited to tree growth as well as supporting other vegetation. As far as the humidity-it's really brutal this summer! But, I will say that I look much younger than some of my friends that live in drier climates. At least there's a positive side-the humidity helps make one's skin look much better. Frankly, I will generally get nose bleeds and have to constantly apply lip balm during the cooler months when I visit the D.

I live in Eastern New Mexico. Very dry out here but very comfortable evenings (in summer) as well as Fall and Spring. As my husband and I are considering retirement, I'd like to look at both Dallas and Houston (Woodlands) to move to because I have family in both areas. However, growing up in E TX, I remember how steaming hot the summers were. I have lived in the West now for 18 years (CO, AZ, AK & NM) so I'm in a real quandary.... wanting to be near family but don't much like intense humidity. I wish the Hill Country had a few mountains thrown in there.....

[Northanna_2001]

Originally Posted by Lakewooder

Wrong again porridge breath!

I guess you must have lived out north somewhere close to Oklahoma on a former cotton farm.

Here is The Great Trinity Forest with the gorgeous Oz-like Dallas skyline setting it off!

(or she must have lived out west where there are tons of cotton farms). If you drive from Lubbock or Amarillo to Clovis a certain time of the year, cotton is everywhere in the fields.....

[Northanna_2001]

Originally Posted by rantanamo

And as for beautiful places, I notice that by far, most people DON'T live in the actual beautiful areas if they live in an attractive area. My brother recently moved to Phoenix, and we did the whole natural wonders tour and stay around southern Utah, Sedona, Flagstaff, northern New Mexico. I said wow, this must be awesome to live so close to. He said, working people don't have time to enjoy this stuff most of the time. Its just mountains in the distance. He also reminded me of how few people live in these beautiful places. I was like wow, did you guys live on a nice hill overlooking the water. They said, Bill Gates does. But its there.

Ah contraire. I have lived many places during my husband's military career. What we were always attracted to about where we lived, you can bet that I researched the housing around the area and made it work..... in that we got to live very close to beautiful in most of the places we lived. For example, dh was posted to Colorado Springs, I found a lovely smaller home in the mountains (Chipita Pk CO) and we lived our normal, everyday lives but just got to see beautiful everyday. Same thing with Anchorage (of course, there's tons of beauty surrounding Anchorage). If you are resourceful and are open minded, you can make things work and be affordable and have beautiful scenery close by.

[Northanna_2001]

Originally Posted by Mister Nifty

New Hampshire does sound nice with all those puritan white folks who like to worship witchcraft before eating mincemeat pie and dancing naked around a maypole. But I prefer Texas where a person can climb atop any two story structure to not see everything there is to see within the state.

Too funny!

[Mister Nifty]

Originally Posted by AlGreen

i don't think mesquite trees are native this far east in texas, although you will find them. and actually, cedar trees are not arid. the ones you find in dallas are actually juniperus virginiana (eastern red cedar) which is, as the name implies, native to the eastern u.s.

truth be told, dallas is not an arid city at all. it's southern plains

True, I didn't say that it was. But to appreciate Dallas - Fort Worth, one has to realize how semi-arid it is. Just a short trip to the west and to the southwest will prove this. If there ever existed a gateway to the west from the east, then it is Dallas - Fort Worth. The trees end abruptly in Dallas. Actually, they end before they get to Dallas, as the trees just tended to grow to hug the rivers and creeks in this region. Trees do exist west of Fort Worth, but they too tend to hug the rivers and the creeks while the trees in the higher elevations start mixing in with cactus-like semi-arid plants.
The quickest way to see the semi-arid west in the Dallas - Fort Worth area is driving to southwest Dallas county, specifically to Cedar Hills state park. This phenomenon takes place because of its higher elevation in relationship to annual rain fall.
Driving north out of the big bowl that is the DFW area, a phenomenon which creates the three branches of the trinity, one arrives at grasslands growing in and nourished by rich, black soil like that which is found in the heartland of the midwest. One can detect this huge basin by the direction the dams face of the many lakes in the area.
Like I said in a prior post, indigenously speaking, the trees tended to favor the red soil of east Texas.
Dallas - Fort Worth doesn't have the green that Houston has, but it has more of a diversity of it, from the typical plants found on the lower
elevations around the rivers and creeks to more semi-arid plants found in the higher elevations of the hills.
Houston at one time was a marshy, swampy area fed by bayous. These bayous don't look anything today like they used to as virgin channels have one main channel in the middle opening up to numerous smaller channels to each side of it. Because of this, much of the Houston area was mainly the wide areas taken up by these virgin bayous along with marshes and swamps that trickled into them.
I have seen what the area of Houston once looked like and it isn't pretty in a well kept, garden kind of way. There are still many places in the city with these thick, marshy areas of stickers and thick brush that grows to be about 15 foot high.
I can remember a few instances in Houston when searches were called to search for missing people. During these times of searching these dense marshy areas, the wrong bodies were found.
In regards to cedar, I would think it would be a hard wood tree that absorbs water as much from the side as it does from its roots. In other words, the tree feeds itself from every direction which helps keep it from rotting like pine does when left exposed to the rain. Like the hardwood grain of the Redwood trees out west that survive in an area insufficient in rain, but where lots of fog pours in from the Pacific.

[Mister Nifty]

Originally Posted by Metro Matt

The high humidity of Houston makes for a pretty green city. You definitely know you're in the Deep South when you see Spanish Moss draping from the limbs of trees older than the city itself.

Houston is only marshy on the far eastern side of the city headed towards Louisiana. The western side is flat coastal plains & the Katy Prairie. Northern Houston is in the Piney Woods region though you do find large groves of pine trees as far south as Clear Lake near NASA.

Both Houston & Dallas have the flood plains you are referring to. Ever heard of the Trinity River near Downtown Dallas?

I just know history and how the Texas army during the Texas revolutionary war against Mexico had to make their way along a trail cut through incredibly thick brush. See, all these rivers and boyous today in modern Texas used to be virgin which means they had a main channel down the middle of them intermingling and emptying often into numerous smaller channels paralleling them on each side. To each side of these very wide virgin rivers and boyous were marshes and swamps that just trickled into the main channels. As one can imagine, this took up a lot more property than modern rivers and boyous do today.
What you interpret west Houston being today is not what it looked like prior to it being mowed, plowed, and dug up into oblivion.

[Mister Nifty]

Originally Posted by Northanna_2001

Ah contraire. I have lived many places during my husband's military career. What we were always attracted to about where we lived, you can bet that I researched the housing around the area and made it work..... in that we got to live very close to beautiful in most of the places we lived. For example, dh was posted to Colorado Springs, I found a lovely smaller home in the mountains (Chipita Pk CO) and we lived our normal, everyday lives but just got to see beautiful everyday. Same thing with Anchorage (of course, there's tons of beauty surrounding Anchorage). If you are resourceful and are open minded, you can make things work and be affordable and have beautiful scenery close by.

I have often seen the beauty in living as an American Eskimo in Alaska or an Innuit in Canada. They have lots of leisure time to look around at the mountains as they only need to kill a blue whale on occasion after which the whole community pitches in to drag its carcass up to a glacier to keep it iced down. That amount of blubber would probably keep a whole village fat for at least a couple of centuries.