What was growing on the land at RR 1431 and FM 2342 before the clearing crews came? In its October 2026 issue, Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine answered that question. Its feature "Before the Bulldozers," by Erin Wunderlich, follows volunteers down an old ranch road on the site. They walked past oak thickets and prickly pear and dug up miniature barrel cacti, lace cacti, fringed puccoon and balsam gourd while the land was still pasture.
The land is now Kingsland Commons, the planned town-square development across from Lake LBJ. Texas Parks & Wildlife puts the property at 45 acres, and the developer's own materials say 49. On Oct. 20, the project's social media said clearing was close to finished. Many of the plants that used to grow there haven't gone far. A good share of them were deliberately sent back into Kingsland, to a garden club sale table, a coffee shop garden and the yards of the volunteers who dug them.
A garden club introduction started it
The rescue started with a local connection. According to the Texas Parks & Wildlife account, a Kingsland Garden Club member introduced developer Gregg Miller to Ashley Landry, founder and president of the Native Plant Rescue Project. Miller told the magazine his reaction was simple: "I thought, 'What a great idea.'"
Landry has run the volunteer nonprofit since 2022. The group digs up native plants and collects seeds from land scheduled for construction, always with the landowner's cooperation. It charges nothing for the service, its volunteers are insured, and it says it has rescued more than 350 native species. It doesn't try to save everything. The magazine reports that common plants like prickly pear and coreopsis get passed over. The crews look for species on Texas Parks and Wildlife's Species of Greatest Conservation Need list, or plants that are simply hard to find.
The Kingsland site got at least two visits. In September 2025, one group of volunteers collected 300 plants there. The magazine's main scene describes a later November morning, with 16 volunteers in safety vests getting Landry's rules at the gate: stay hydrated, fill in your holes, bring a buddy to the far side of the property, and log how many plants you take home.
Where the plants went
The rescued plants went to five kinds of places, and several of them are in Kingsland.
- Kingsland Garden Club. Club volunteers dug balsam gourd, a native vine that isn't especially rare, to pot and grow on for the club's spring plant sale.
- A Kingsland coffee shop's demonstration garden. Staff from the Savanna Project, a Kingsland-based landscaping company that promotes native and water-saving plants, took several lace cacti for a local coffee shop's demonstration garden. Because this was a nonprofit rescue, the magazine reports, anything they took had to be given away.
- Zilker Botanical Garden. Landry found a group of miniature barrel cacti and arranged for them to go into the conservation collection at Zilker Botanical Garden in Austin.
- School gardens. Jason Koppe, an Austin volunteer who co-led the rescue, helps run the garden at his children's school, where he and the students have replanted rescued vegetation.
- Volunteers' own yards. The magazine notes that volunteers can take plants home, which helps local pollinators.
Roy Dunavant, the Savanna Project's natural resource manager, summed up the day for the Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine reporter: "It's cool that we're getting to save a little bit of the natural history around here." The company's own site says founder David Lindley grew up in Kingsland and Dunavant is a Texas A&M rangeland ecology graduate from Marble Falls, so this was local ground for both of them.
Why the plants were kept close to home
The Zilker cacti are the exception. Most of the rescue was meant to stay local, and Landry gave the reason in the magazine:
"One of the reasons our rescued plants and seeds are important is because they're local ecotypes."
The magazine's account explains that the plants on this site are adapted to western Burnet County's soil and weather. That makes the greater Kingsland area the best place for them, and for anything grown from their seed. That's why a balsam gourd potted for a Kingsland Garden Club sale counts as a better outcome than the same vine shipped to a nursery in another part of the state.
Seeds stretch the effort further. When the project gives seed to a nursery, it records where the seed was collected. Growers can then raise many more plants than volunteers could ever dig, for restoration work or for sale to the public. The magazine gives an example from Austin Water's Wildland Conservation Division. Using the project's seed, the division germinated close to a dozen Texas almond shrubs, a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, and the project later sent it 80 more Texas almond plants from a large patch found at another rescue site.
Kingsland wasn't the group's first contact with the Highland Lakes. In May 2025, the Highland Lakes Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas hosted Landry at Marble Falls Library for a talk on the project's local work.
How to see or grow those plants
Since many of the plants stayed local, Kingsland residents have a few concrete ways to see them, grow them, or help with the next rescue.
- Go to Friday's Kingsland Garden Club program. On Friday, Nov. 6, from 1 to 2 p.m., master gardener Willard Horn presents "And they called it Poppy Love" at Kingsland Public Library, 125 W. Polk St. According to the Kingsland Chamber listing, it's free and open to the public. The club's 2026–2027 season opened Sept. 11 with Texas Parks & Wildlife biologist Chris Mostyn speaking on urban deer life in Central Texas. Anyone with a garden on a deer path in town can see why the two topics belong on the same calendar.
- Watch for the spring plant sale. The balsam gourd went into pots for this sale. In 2026 it was held Saturday, March 21, from 8 a.m. to noon at 1801 W. RR 1431, according to DailyTrib's spring calendar. The club hasn't announced a 2027 date. The sale has run for years and isn't always in the same month: a 2012 notice put it on April 7, behind the Wells Fargo on Chamberlain Street.
- Volunteer for a rescue. You can apply through the Native Plant Rescue Project's volunteer form, and the same page has a form for reporting upcoming development sites. In a Native Prairies Association of Texas profile, Landry says volunteers get the site location a few days ahead and start with a safety briefing. Fieldwork usually takes three to four hours, and caring for the plants afterward goes on for months. The magazine lists the Hill Country among the regions the group already covers, along with Dallas, Austin, Houston, New Braunfels and areas south of San Antonio.
- Ask a local native-plant landscaper. The Savanna Project offers native and drought-tolerant landscaping, hydroseeding, soil aeration and compost top-dressing, and its stated mission is promoting native habitat while conserving water.
What comes next on the cleared ground
The site is moving from clearing to construction. The project's Oct. 20 post said infrastructure would go in next, and it described a planned golf cart tunnel under FM 2342 connecting the Commons to The Legends. In May, DailyTrib reported the developer's estimate of about four years to full buildout, with plans that include a central park, an amphitheater, a splash pad, walking trails and a boutique hotel. The project website adds 10 acres of parks, trails and open space to that plan.
At McAlister Realty, we follow what's changing along the RR 1431 corridor because it's our home stretch too. If the work at RR 1431 and FM 2342 has you wondering how the new town square will sit alongside your own Kingsland property, Request a Market Consultation and talk it through with Tara.
