The magic on the Buckeye Trail occurs, off of the hardscape, on the hard-won soft trails to the Buckeye Grove, the confluence of White Rock Creek with the Trinity River, and (if you dare) the bois d’arc bottoms along White Rock Creek. Comprising over 6,000 acres, the Great Trinity Forest is the largest urban bottomland forest in the US (far exceeding New York’s Central Park, designed by Olmsted the year following his Texas visit).
The trail is located in a succession forest which emerged after intervening logging and agriculture use. Aside from scattered old-growth pecan, ash, cottonwood, and bois d’arc trees (and a magnificent bur oak named Ned) which were preserved for nuts and shade for livestock, the current forest has arisen since the 1960s when the bottomland ceased being used as a pasture for Metzger’s Dairy.
pecan grove
wetland
The property lay fallow for decades as business, governmental, and environmentalist groups fought over the future of the Trinity and its bottomlands.
In this fertile limestone clay soil, top-dressed by alluvial sandy loam, wind and flood-borne seeds of fast-growing ash, hackberry, and elm have thrived and now dominate the forest’s canopy as they compete for sunlight.
wild rye
The forest floors surround the trail with ephemeral wetlands, lush understory trees and shrubs that don’t mind their feet wet, and wild rye grass and other forbs.
Indigenous people and Texas settlers experienced these same conditions. A member of the delegation accompanying Sam Houston on his 1843 mission to the area to execute a treaty with Indigenous leaders recounted that the wild rye along White Rock Creek near its confluence with the Trinity was “thick and plenty, and green as the finest wheat fields” and that its members got lost in the “bois d’arc bottoms.”
The privilege of being enveloped by green in this bottomland forest is to share the experience of our predecessors in the regenerative power and luxuriant confusion of nature.
