Client:
City of Alexandria
Capitol Projects Administrator
Delores Brewer
(318) 449-5086
Awards:
• Louisiana Chapter, American Society of Landscape Architects, Honor Award, 2000.

Compton Park began as an off-shoot of a Public Works drainage project. The goal was to use some of the 30-acre tract of land as a detention pond to handle local flooding pressures and the rest as public open space.

Early on Moore Planning Group, LLC (MPG) began working closely with the city’s mayor and engineers to combine the two projects to make them better than they would have been separately. Instead of the typical rectangular pond, the detention basin received a more natural, curvilinear treatment, allowing for a good transition to a new neighborhood park. Instead of the usual park design, the landscape architects, the mayor and the 5th grade class of nearby Julius B. Nachman Elementary School worked together to create an environmentally sensitive park where the community could come to learn about the area’s animals and native vegetation.

The safety of the park’s visitors was the city’s main focus; reducing the typically high maintenance requirements of a community park was also a concern. To fence in the detention basin, MPG designed a free-form “wild zone” of black vinyl that disappears into the landscape of native wildflowers and host butterfly plant material. Rather than planting vegetation that needs constant upkeep, a “wild zone” filled with a variety of native plants, wild flowers and trees grows to form this “learning edge” which attracts butterflies and butterfly enthusiasts from across the state.

As part of its continuing relationship with the city, MPG developed a landscape management program that allows for the privatization of the park’s maintenance, thus reducing the burden and cost on the municipal maintenance division.The highly utilized park offers the community not only passive activities such as walking and jogging, but also a learning environment with natural habitats where visitors and area students can learn about ecosystems and their importance to the overall environment.