- [Daniel] The opportunity to create a three-acre refuge has been really quite remarkable.

- Hi, I'm Dr. Molly Beth Malcolm with Austin Community College District, and I'm so excited to be here in this fabulous space that we have at Austin Community College, which once was the site of the original mall in Austin, Texas, Highland Mall, and it was a hopping place when it started back in 1971.

But as malls do throughout the years, they often fall into disrepair.

We wanted to keep the old mall and see what we could do rather than tear it down to build it and make it sustainable, so that's exactly what we did.

But part of that plan was to have beautiful green spaces.

At the time, it probably had about 97% of this area was impervious cover, and we wanted to bring it back to be beautiful spaces for our students, faculty, staff, and the community.

- My name's Daniel Woodroffe, president and founder of DWG Landscape Architects, - And I'm Cassie Gowan, Design Director at DWG Landscape Architects.

- This was a story about converting parking lots to parks, but it was so much more than that.

It was about adaptive reuse.

It was about celebrating the role and importance of water and water management, of native plants, of understanding a sense of taking a neighborhood that was devoid of parks and open spaces, and giving a place to gather and come together.

- We knew that we wanted to bring the history back.

This was originally belonged to St. John Baptist Association, and every year, they would have beautiful tent revivals for two or three weeks where people would come in with their tents and camp, and then they would have Bible study.

Ultimately, there was an orphanage, the first African-American orphanage in the state, and a vocational school built here, thus the name St. John Encampment Commons.

- The Heritage Live Oaks actually have a really unique story is that when we were awarded the project, five of the Live Oaks had actually already been transplanted from a previous phase of the building 1000 improvements on the campus, but they were placed onto the asphalt and these kind of upturn kind of ice cream mounds, and they were fine, but they were seven feet up in the air.

And so part of the design thesis that was developed was a sense of lifting and stitching, and that's where the genesis of the amphitheater mound actually came from in terms of understanding the grading of the site, which falls from high to low.

- [Cassie] As the low point of the site, and we just embraced it, so this is where we wanna put this sponge garden that's gonna slow down the storm water.

It's gonna help soak the water and it's gonna help filter things out of the water before it gets back into the system.

We've got bald cypress, Mexican sycamore, sabal minors, possumhaw hollies, lots of frog fruit, I love frog fruit, switch grass.

A lot of things that are typically found.

It's sort of a micro riparian, I would say more of an abstract of a riparian sponge garden.

It kind of cools the space next to the pavilion.

We have a million-gallon cistern that's helping to reclaim all the water in this area and irrigate the campus.

- The parking lot was 95, 97% asphalt and concrete.

Today, we've seen well over an 85% reduction to porous pavers to the lawn, to the planters, and we had to be really quite bulletproof with the planting.

- The ice storm of 2021, Uri, the garden had only been installed for a little while, and then we got hit by that, and so we did have probably a few casualties.

Some of the mountain laurels got nipped down, but for the most part, it's a huge testament to the resiliency of native plants.

- There's so much kind of balance between the evergreen mass and then the kind of the spikes of color and interest throughout the year.

- [Cassie] I lay out the evergreen sort of structure, the anchor things, and then silver-blue things peppered in, and so I think that always has a nice cooling effect, and it sends your eye around the space.

There's also threads of red.

I wanted this to be for the hummingbirds.

The palette has a lot of purples in threaded throughout.

- [Molly] We also have, if you notice, the purple poles that represent the river bats, we're the River Bats, and purple is the color for the college.

- I wanted to tie that color palette into the landscape just subtly.

We have the 'Henry Duelberg', Salvia farinacea, and Peter's Purple monada is kind of in that color range, lots of fall asters.

And then the fuzzy grass mix at the edges, a lot of times a park might have just turf at the edges, and we wanted it to feel more wild and fuzzy and a nod to the native grasses that are the sideoats grama, which is the state grass of Texas, little bluestem, the blue grama.

We have the Mexican feather grass mixed in there.

They act as larval host plants for a lot of the skippers and butterflies.

There's things that are blooming in the early spring through the summer through the fall, and so there's plenty of nectar and host plants for all the pollinators, and when we talk about pollinators, it's not just the butterflies, it's the bees, honeybees, native bees, bumblebees, wasps, beetles, all the insects, hummingbirds, birds, bats.

We've got Texas red buds, Mexican buckeyes, possumhaw hollies, mountain laurels, the sweet almond verbena, that's not a native.

It's an adopted species, but once it's established, it's really root hardy, and so it acts kind of like a perennial, probably toward the middle of summer, those are going to be exploding and you'll just smell it.

Smells so wonderful.

And the bees and butterflies love that one too, hummingbirds as well.

I love combining whirling butterflies white gaura with white Salvia greggii and then the grasses, so they kind of dance in the landscape, I think that also has a cooling effect in the summer.

It's kind of calming too.

We've got kind of a fall sequence with the fall aster, the Gulf muhly, the shrubby boneset, for the start of fall migration out.

In the winter, we have lots of possumhaw hollies and yaupon hollies for the birds.

One of my favorite things is the cedar wax wing, and when they come like little bandits to take, they take all the berries all at once, like little gangsters.

- [Daniel] Part of Cassie's kind of brilliance is doing it in almost kind of like a paintbrush way of very descriptive, bold way.

- We love turning parking lots into parks and taking basically a lifeless, dead place and bringing life into it.

- We can have a convocation here.

We can have gatherings.

There's different areas all around for people to see it.

You can have a class here.

Someone else could just be enjoying their coffee, listening to the birds and watching the squirrels and seeing the grackles that'll come get your coffee as they were headed this way right now.

And then, of course, the beautiful scenery.

- You go from maybe one bird, a grackle kind of pooping on everyone's cars to now, this kind of cornucopia of species, this kind of refuge that's been created.

It's been a really remarkable story of transformation.

(gentle music)