If your dream is to see acres of dusty, scratchy fields transformed into a museum of towering hardwoods, it's best if you have a strong will, a good amount of money, and a deep well of patience.
Luckily for us, Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines has all three.
Meeting him to talk about his Garden of Trees dream project on a warm fall afternoon, a flashback popped into my head of a similarly sunny day a few years back. Villines joined the mayors of Little Rock and North Little Rock to lead the inaugural bike ride over finished portions of the 14-mile “Take it to the Edge” trail. Lining up at the River Market pavilion, Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey propped his fancy road bike against his hip and talked about his favorite cycling routes. North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays talked about how good he felt now that he'd taken to peddling a few miles several times a week.
A few feet away, Villines puffed on a cigarette while he got a quick lesson on how to operate his borrowed wheels. He'd dropped some weight recently, but the cigarette and those ever-present polyester slacks told the world he was still no athlete. Villines and the mayors led the ride together for maybe the first mile, but Villines soon fell to the middle of the pack. By mile four mechanical problems forced him over to the curb, where he pulled on another cigarette while a do-gooder tinkered with his broken-down Huffy.
“I'm an addict,” Villines admitted when I found him smoking on the porch outside his office before our meeting about plans for Two Rivers Park. But those compromised lungs work best in the fresh air, and Villines is all about making sure there'll be plenty of fresh air to go around. He drives a hybrid Honda Civic, and one of his goals is to stop the sprawl of highways and subdivisions that come along with the exodus of people from urban areas.
“We've spent so much money on highways encouraging people to live outside cities. We should be spending money to encourage people to live inside the city,” he said. He hopes his Garden of Trees at Two Rivers Park, which will eventually be linked to other parks via a countywide trail system, will help do that.
The idea for a Garden of Trees was born a few years ago when county and city leaders commissioned a study to determine the best use of their jointly-owned peninsula that juts out into the Arkansas River where it converges with the Little Maumelle. The northern side of the peninsula, which is covered with trails through a wetland forest, belongs to Little Rock. The other 600 acres belong to the county.
“Until the mid-70s it was the county penal farm,” Villines said. “The inmates lived and worked there.” It's easy to imagine those long yellow fields covered with rows of vegetables tended by men in orange jumpsuits. Oily drainage and irrigation ditches still meander through the open parts of Two Rivers, but all the old buildings have long been torn down. When the farm was abandoned, developers started eying the property and dreaming of waterfront subdivisions just six miles from downtown.
But consultants hired by Little Rock and Pulaski County determined the area, which is locked in a riparian flood plain and has only one entrance route, was best suited for a park. The Corps of Engineers bought a permanent flood easement from the county for $150,000, which prevents the county from ever building on its Two Rivers land but gave them seed money for a park. And more money from the state gasoline tax could be tapped to build trails.
For Villines and other county leaders, this was a chance to create an accessible outdoor park that even the mall-walking set could get behind. The trails would be paved, easy to get to, and flat, flat, flat. Parking places would be plentiful. And instead of a collage of whatever trees happened to sprout up, the park would be planted so visitors would be able to learn and remember the species they saw.
“The old saying is that you can't see the forest for the trees? Well, I can't see the trees for the forest,” Villines said. He can look a tree up in a field guide to learn its name and special characteristics, but as soon as the next tree a few feet away catches his attention, the first one vanishes from memory. He wanted a park with homogeneous “rooms” of trees, cultivated monocultures that would stick in the brain.
He tapped the University of Arkansas Community Design Center in Fayetteville for a bargain rate on what turned out to be an award-winning garden design.
Villines's one mandate was that the garden be designed in a way that visitors would be able to remember what they saw, and it took designers at the university a while to hammer out the best way to meet his requirement.
They considered clustering trees in polka dots and stripes across the grounds before settling on a sophisticated design based on the Fibonacci sequence, a proportioning system that organizes much of nature. Each of the garden's five main outdoor courtyards or “rooms” will be decorated with specially chosen native species that work together toward a theme.
“I think one of the reasons we liked this direction is that the idea of the room seemed to be the best way to manifest some of the thoughts about remembering trees,” explained Steve Luoni, director of the Arkansas Community Design Center. The design they settled on has won national recognition including the Unbuilt Architecture Design Award from the Boston Society of Architects and a 2005 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
A strip of traditional mixed forest will border the Garden of Trees to camouflage the formal arrangement inside. But once visitors pass the dense border, they'll find soft walking paths threading through a neat series of formal courtyards. Each courtyard will have its own special theme, like the Red Room with its three walls of red maples that will turn a vibrant red every fall. The room will also have a wildflower meadow dominated by the red-hued purple coneflower.
 Other rooms include the Bosque Plaza, bosque being a Spanish word forest. Here, five clusters of trees will be designed like giant bouquets. The Red Bosque will be planted with Black Tupelo, Red Maple and Virginia Sweetspire, all species that turn red in the fall. There will also be a Yellow Bosque, a White Bosque for trees that bloom white in the spring, a Delicate Bosque and the Nuts and Berries Bosque.
The courtyards are divided by narrow openings, much like the exhibit spaces in many art museums.
“It creates a sense of discovery or mystery, but still within a larger logic that's easy to navigate through,” Luoni said.
The pathways cross each other and loop in different directions, so visitors can choose different routes each time.
The paths, which have already been laid out, are all flat and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a few people were already wandering over them. They're bordered now by piles of mulch and wooden stakes laid out to tell the planters where the trees should go.
The Garden of Trees will include 21 species of trees, most of them hardwoods native to Arkansas. Crews are scheduled to plant 500 saplings this winter and more than 4,000 more over the next two to three years. It will likely take at least ten years for the new trees to mature.
“Part of the experience of this, especially for the younger kids, is that they'll get to see a forest grow up, Villines said.
The garden will be situated inside the Quorum Court Trail, four miles of paved paths that are especially popular among young families with children just learning to ride their bikes. Designers hope once the trees are planted, the park will also attract birdwatchers, amateur botanists, and people just out for a nice stroll.
“It's in the tradition of great urban parks where it's for everybody,” Luoni said.
There's already talk of building a canoe launch so boaters could put in at Two Rivers and paddle up to Pinnacle. And plans are being drawn up for a pedestrian bridge to link Two Rivers to Murray Park.
Design and planting costs for the garden are expected to run about $100,000. A nonprofit group will be formed to raise money for the park's upkeep, and Villines said he expects inmates to return to the old penal farm to help with maintenance. All in all it's a small investment for potentially huge returns, Villines said.
“You have to think about what makes a community livable,” he said. He believes a showpiece of a park with miles of trails and a unique layout will be one more perk for people who resist the pull of the suburbs.
And although he teases about being the poster child for poor health and obesity, Buddy is pushing for a healthier community. He thinks trails, parks, and fresh air will go a long way.
“There aren't enough sidewalks, and no one walks anywhere, anyway. We've encouraged people to not have healthy habits,” he said. “We've got to reverse that.”
Austin Gelder is a writer for Heifer International. Talk to her at austin.gelder@heifer.org.
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