Goat Cave Karst Preserve Walk n' Clean with Author Elizabeth McGreevy

Interested in exploring one of Austin's hidden preserves? Do you want to know more about native plants? Would you like to work out your issues with everyone's local frenemy, the Ashe Juniper. We can do all this and more while ALSO, caring for the land by doing trash clean-up and light invasive removal throughout the preserve.

We welcome Elizabeth McGreevy, author of WANTED! Dead and Alive, Mountain Cedars, as she discusses native plants in the preserve and helps us all work through the trauma caused by the Hill Country's own chemical warfare agent, cedar pollen. 

Elizabeth will discuss how the Texas Hill Country landscape has transformed over the past 100 years. Our region sits at the crossroads of two distinct ecological systems: the Blackland Prairie and the Texas Hill Country. Historically, the Blackland Prairie was an open expanse of rolling grasslands dotted with oak trees, while the Texas Hill Country featured a balanced mosaic of forests and prairies. Today, that balance has dramatically shifted to vast, dense thickets of mountain cedars (native junipers). Elizabeth will discuss how these changes unfolded while proposing some nature-based solutions to help improve Hill Country soils, groundwaters, and wildlife habitats.

We will also have hydrogeologist, Dr. Nico Hauwert, on board supplying history and facts about how the Goat Cave Karst Preserve came to be along with details about the importance of the geological features that exist beneath our feet.