LAUP students garner ASLA awards at April conference

Texas A&M’s landscape architecture students’ groundbreaking designs of educational butterfly gardens and a master plan-level environmental analysis of “green,” low-impact development techniques for a portion of the university campus earned awards at the April 8, 2011 Texas Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects annual convention at Moody Gardens in Galveston.

An undergraduate team consisting of Kristina Baldridge, Jennifer Berg and Brian Frederick won first place in the Undergraduate General Design category for their entry, “Mercer Arboretum Iconic Butterfly Garden.”

The design, they said, challenges the standards of conventional butterfly gardens by providing a space that facilitates community involvement and interaction by combining educational experiences and iconic sculptural elements.

Students selected the butterfly garden’s plants based on the food, shelter and larval requirements of the 42 moth and butterfly species their research showed were common to the Houston area.

Their design includes large sculptural elements representing stages of the butterflies’ life cycle, as well as a pergola near the garden entrance to accommodate small gatherings.

A team of graduate students examining the potential benefits of ‘green’ development ideas for a large portion of Texas A&M’s campus captured honorable mention in the analysis and planning category.

The evaluated measures, known generically as low-impact management techniques, suggested green roof and vegetated wall surfaces and called for widespread use of “bioswales,” or landscape elements that minimize and cleanse stormwater runoff and slow peak discharge.

Green roofs, which lower heating and cooling costs by reducing roof heat during the day and cooling it at night, could save the university millions of dollars over a 60-year period, wrote the students in their conclusion.

The entry was prepared by Naishi Bu, James Montano, Prajakta Kedar, Xuemei Luo, Aaron Eaquinto, Mark Swapp, Adam Nugent, Dizi Shi, Xin Yang, Alisa Dawson, Yosuke Tominaga and Yi Xue.

Another butterfly garden design for Mercer Arboretum, created by undergraduates Kyle Pennington and P. Ashley Timmerman, captured general design honorable mention honors in the statewide ASLA competition. This alternative, the students said, was specifically designed to promote the spirit of discovery through interaction and active learning.

The site was created to influence human movement by attracting visitors to nodes designed to encourage a specific butterfly behavior, said Pennington and Timmerman. “These features include the ‘Bubbler’ water feature and interactive sunstones, providing visitors with the opportunity to observe butterflies drinking water and sunbathing.”

The design also included a functioning dome that provides a semi-controlled environment for butterflies and larvae while also accommodating semi-annual flood conditions in the park. The dome can also be used to host butterfly release events.