Crestwood Park's Back to Nature Project: Why the Turf Is Going

If you walked a dog past the disc golf course on Meadowfern Drive last summer, or tried to play a full round and found half the holes taped off, you remember the dead, herbicide-brown turf and the orange fencing. The easy assumption at the time was that something had gone wrong. Budget cuts. A maintenance crew that fell behind. Construction that stalled out.

None of that was true. What happened at Crestwood Park was deliberate, funded, and had been quietly building since 2022. It's called the Back to Nature Project, and more than a year later, it's still working its way through your neighborhood park one growing season at a time.

The turf was killed on purpose

On July 16, 2025, contractors began applying herbicide to roughly seven acres of parkland north of Mulberry Creek, the stream that runs through Crestwood Park. Some walking paths and several disc golf holes closed during treatment, which is the fencing and dead grass longtime park users remember from that summer. According to reporting from the St. Louis Call Newspapers, the goal is to turn that ground into a thriving prairie, woodland, and rain garden habitat, with work expected to continue through 2028.

The project is backed by a Missouri Department of Conservation grant called Back to Nature StL, a competitive program that funds native habitat restoration in public parks around the region. Crestwood first won the grant in 2022, when it covered roughly $75,000 for what was then an 8.75-acre plan. The scope has since been refined to about seven acres, but the core idea hasn't changed: strip out invasive plants, remove the high-maintenance turf that dominates the north side of the park, and replace it with the kind of prairie, savanna, woodland, and wetland ground cover that used to define this part of Missouri before subdivisions and mowed lawns took over.

The contractor doing the seeding and planting is Compass Native Landscapes, a St. Louis firm that specializes in habitat restoration. The city's landscape architecture partner, DTLS, worked on the original design. Forest ReLeaf of Missouri has supplied trees. Open Space STL and the local volunteer group Beautify Crestwood have run hands-on workdays since the project's earliest phase. The whole thing is coordinated by the city's own conservationist, Angie Weber, who took over as project manager and is the point of contact if you have questions about what you're seeing at the park.

Why Crestwood is doing this to its own park

This isn't a one-off experiment. Crestwood is Missouri's first Bee City USA affiliate and also holds Tree City USA status, both national recognitions tied to pollinator habitat and urban forestry. The Back to Nature Project is the most visible expression of that commitment, but it's not decorative. There are two practical reasons behind it.

The first is water. Mulberry Creek runs through the restoration area, and deep-rooted native plants absorb far more stormwater runoff than turf grass does. The city's stated goal is to reduce flooding and erosion along the creek once the native plantings mature, which takes a few growing seasons to show real effect.

The second is money. Turf has to be mowed every week for half the year. Native prairie and woodland ground cover do not. Once established, the new plantings are expected to lower the park's long-term mowing and maintenance costs, which matters for a city that has held a AAA credit rating from S&P Global Ratings and takes its budget discipline seriously.

Mayor Scott Shipley put it plainly when Crestwood was named a 2025 Green Business City through the Missouri Botanical Garden's Green Business Challenge: "Sustainability isn't just a program for Crestwood, it's a mindset."

The part nobody loves yet

Not every resident was on board when this started. At the Crestwood Park Board's June 17, 2025 meeting, weeks before the herbicide crews arrived, residents showed up to raise concerns about the project, according to the Call Newspapers report. Some of the pushback is aesthetic. Dead turf and bare dirt look like neglect, not progress, especially in the early months. Some of it is practical. If you've built a Saturday routine around a full 18-hole disc golf round or a specific dog-walking loop, a closed section is a closed section no matter how good the long-term plan sounds.

That friction is worth naming honestly, because it's the most common thing people feel when they first hear about this project. The visible mess is proportional to how much ground is actually changing. Seven acres of established turf don't become a prairie by leaving them alone. They become a prairie by being killed off, reseeded, and re-established over multiple growing seasons, and that process is not going to look tidy on the way there.

What's already happened, and what comes next

The timeline, pulled from the city's own conservation page and its recent updates, looks like this:

• 2022: Invasive species removal begins along the creek, run largely through volunteer partnerships with Open Space STL, after the city wins a Missouri Department of Conservation grant for the project
• 2025: Volunteer tree planting starts; on July 16, contractors begin applying herbicide to roughly seven acres north of the creek, closing some paths and disc golf holes for the season
• Winter 2025 into 2026: Compass Native Landscapes begins seeding the prepped ground with native mixes and continues targeted removal of remaining invasive plants
• 2026 and 2027: Formal native gardens, a rain garden, and additional tree plantings go in as the seeded ground moves through its first growing seasons
• Through 2028: Ongoing establishment, monitoring, and expansion of the habitat areas

The tree list gives a sense of what the finished ground will actually look like once it fills in. The city has named redbud, downy serviceberry, wild plum, possumhaw, and American hornbeam as the understory trees going into the restored areas, chosen for seasonal color and layered habitat rather than shade alone.

You can actually go help, and see it up close

If reading about a multi-year restoration from a distance feels unsatisfying, there's a more direct option. Open Space STL and the city run seasonal volunteer events at Crestwood Park called honeysuckle hacks, usually scheduled in spring and fall, where residents show up with loppers to physically remove bush honeysuckle, a shrub the Missouri Botanical Garden has identified as one of the most destructive invasive species in the region. Past events have met at the park's upper and lower pavilions off Meadowfern Drive, with tools provided for anyone who doesn't bring their own. It's a genuinely good way to see the transformation up close instead of just reading about it, and to understand exactly which patches of green you're looking at are native and which ones are still the honeysuckle crews are working to clear.

If you want project-specific updates rather than general volunteer listings, Angie Weber, the city's conservationist, is the named contact for Back to Nature questions through the city's conservation page.

The bigger pattern

Crestwood Park isn't the only ground in the city getting reworked this way. Just across town at Whitecliff Park, the new community center known as The Cliffs is under construction with its own rain garden planned for the street frontage, using boulders uncovered during excavation and relocated to Ferndale Park rather than hauled away. Read together, these projects say something about how this city thinks about its outdoor spaces right now. Crestwood isn't just adding amenities. It's rebuilding the ground itself, betting that a park that looks rougher for two or three years will function better, cost less to maintain, and hold up to weather better for decades after that.

So the next time you're at Crestwood Park and notice ground that doesn't look like the mowed turf you grew up with, you'll know what you're looking at. Nothing happened to it. Something is still happening because of it, and the project has two more growing seasons to go before anyone can call it finished.

Crestwood keeps showing up in ways like this, in the small civic decisions that don't make headlines but shape what it actually feels like to live here day to day. If you're curious about what else is changing in this city, or thinking about your own next move in Crestwood or anywhere in South St. Louis County, Amy Prusinowski has spent almost three decades paying attention to exactly this kind of detail. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next.