The humble rain garden: digging up the parking lot

Excerpted from Dr Joanna Ashworth’s talk in the Water Teachings Workshop, May 16, 2021,

with response from Facilitator Aline LaFlamme.

80% of our world's population live in cities; so when I imagine how I hope to live, I find my thoughts begin in cities.

The blue green city is something that I think we should have as part of our imagination. The blue green city is a natural orientation to the water cycle, a place that combines and protects the values of hydrology, ecology within the urban landscape. It can respond to drought, flooding, heat, and to our needs for social life, connection to nature - and beauty.

The water cycle is simple…

…the flow of precipitation, infiltration, absorption, water going to surface and then going into groundwater and then recharging groundwater, condensation and so on. But in cities, this natural cycle has been interrupted.

Yes, as we in Vancouver look around this afternoon, we see trees - but once, the whole vast city and surroundings were all forest.  Not long ago, water was absorbed and recycled in the forest floor in an endless water cycle. In less than one hundred years, we’ve lost all that green space and covered it with impervious asphalt, concrete, even grasses that are very dense.

Water has no place to go.

We've eroded land. We've lost soil. And now the hot days are hotter. The wet days are wetter. We’re facing increased flooding and drought. This shift is affecting how cities can manage, contain and control water. Mostly we've been using great infrastructure - but the Green City is a water-sensitive city.

The idea of the blue green doesn’t remove all the hardscapes that control and convey water. But cities are slowly coming to the realization that in the next one hundred years, we're going to have to integrate in powerful ways, particularly as climate change alters how we deal with excessive water and lack of water.

In my work I’m motivated by these threats; by the way we are using a colonial form of urban planning combined with climate change, how we are living unsustainably, by the waste we're generating in cities, and by a strong desire for this blue, green future.

Some stories influence me powerfully, and I’m going to tell two of them.

Some of you’ll know the story of Still Creek, which I think reflects our sense of the invisible becoming visible. It’s about 14 km long, running from Vancouver into Burnaby and draining into Burnaby Lake. In Vancouver, it's mostly underground, like many of streams in urban areas that have been paved over and forgotten.

An artist, Carmen Rosen, who founded the Still Moon Society, was responsible for getting the community to pay attention and to make the creek visible at that time. She lived near a ravine that was constantly littered and disregarded; she created a lantern festival and many other arts-engaged activities that brought visibility to this creek.

When people started to see it, they started to care about its' possibilities.  She made it visible. To me, that’s an incredibly powerful form of leadership.

They unearthed the creek, (the ecological restoration process people call this “daylighting”). The habitat was restored; water quality was restored, and after years of work, in 2012. the salmon returned. Collaboration between community ecological specialists and all levels of government made it happen. It began with art and community.

The second story is about two moms and a local school, Pauline Johnson Elementary. The School Board was going to put some big pipes in the playground and clean up the water situation. The moms said no. They saw another possibility: to change the way water was being addressed in that playing field. They invited the world-famous landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander (a great treasure), who came in and designed this nature-based playground.  At its’ center is a biosphere that captured the water previously flooding that land.

I heard those stories as gateways to possible future opportunities.  I was really motivated to use my role (as a university educator and planner) working mostly with professionals outside of the academic programs - people who’d gone through academic training but were continuously wanting to learn about new practices. So I started the North Shore Rain Garden Project, which brought together engineers and landscapers and stream-keepers and ecological restoration specialists and citizens in the community, gardeners that that love to garden, who are really interested in how the humble rain garden could actually make a difference in an urban setting.

We built two large demonstration projects on the North Shore. To put it in context, really, rain gardens are part of a green infrastructure - the blue green cities way of managing water quality and rainwater management.

A rain garden is a very simple, naturally found technology, but it can be used in incredibly effective ways to help us regain what we've lost by paving over so much of our lands. It's an area that's constructed to receive water. It's planted about at least a foot deep, allows water to flow in, uses plants to infiltrate contaminants and hold them. And then it helps to infiltrate the water back into the soil and down into the groundwater, recharging groundwater, cooling the groundwater before it hits some of our natural systems like streams and creeks that many of us live very close to.

Before building the rain garden, we did some research and found high levels of toxicity in many of the creeks. If you look at them, you can't necessarily tell, but copper and cadmium and lead were found in many samples.

McKay Creek was one of them.

We know parking lots are full of contaminants; they sit on the surface and as soon as it rains, they pour right into the storm drains and creeks. And that is why we have so many contaminated creeks. McKay Creek was right next door to a big shopping mall. It turned out that the head of sustainability (for the company that owned the shopping mall) was an adviser to our Faculty. I asked him if we could do something in the parking lot to show people what a rain garden can do.

This was it - the pavement Joni Mitchell sang about, paving paradise to put up a parking lot. Well, we were digging up a parking lot to try to build a paradise. And I think we did.

In our own little corner of this parking lot we felt lucky. We started with two spots, and wound up with three! We took out the asphalt - we had to be careful of what was underneath.

We invited the community. We had a beautiful design. We worked with this wonderful community-engaged artist, Igor Santino who created this beautiful set of images:

Igor invited people to sit; people came in and out of the shopping mall, to the liquor store or Tim Hortons, and some sat and talked. What is a rain garden? What does it have to do with climate change? What does it have to do with stream quality, water quality? What does that have to do with flooding? What does that have to do with contaminants on the parking lot? It was just a really lovely way to have a conversation. And sometimes people really didn't want to talk at all. They just wanted to draw something and contribute to this mural that we created.

And then we created this lovely garden.

Just last week, there was a heavy rain and I was just checking in - because I feel, in a way, that the rain garden is like family, you know, it's just always on everyone. People that worked on it always write to me saying, I was back, I saw the rain garden and picked up some cigarette butts today, made sure the water is flowing in OK. Anyway, I went to see it…and maybe I might have shed a tear, I was definitely feeling very emotional to see this beautiful garden just working in its’ natural way, capturing and holding that water, slowly, letting it ease into the ground and just that little corner of the parking lot - protecting the water that was going right into McKay Creek.

One rain garden is not nearly enough.

The vision of this project is really inspired by the Ten Thousand Rain Garden Project out of Puget Sound, where they say the same thing: Every rain garden in itself can only do so much. But together, these can all contribute to a huge benefit to the local waterways and salmon habitat.

The other rain garden that we installed was in a kind of murky, abandoned park. There wasn't much going on there. Nobody wanted to go there; it was soggy and dark, overgrown and neglected.

People heard what we were doing and we lobbied the local government. They finally let us have this park to create another rain garden there. And that really mobilized the neighbours. They were really happy to see the park. All the trees that were causing problems down below were trimmed, all the ivy was pulled out, and we built two large gardens - and we’ve just extended them again.

For the community, it was a really inspiring project that beautified and restored, and now it has chat-benches and little local libraries and even a sign that says you can walk your dog there, and you can sit and talk to your neighbours.

There are so many arguments, I would say, for the humble rain garden.  Alone, of course, they don't give us the blue green city that we would imagine, but scaled up, they are a spectacular response to finding our way back to a balanced water cycle, back to the garden and the way we want to live in harmony with nature. And in this time of climate crisis, they offer so many things we can do and learn from.

I think that we need to take action using the assets that we have, the things that are in our community, our circles, our identities, things we're good at, positions we hold, and our understanding about what needs to be done and what can bring us joy. This is inspired by a book called All We Can Save by Kathleen Wilkinson and Others.

But I think when it comes to protecting water, we have so many community assets. We can demonstrate, we can advocate, we can learn, can imagine, can tell stories, disrupt what's happening. We can show solidarity. We can host festivals, we can dance, we can convene and we can find allies.

I encourage us all, as we become more conscious of water in our lives and how much we depend on it and take it for granted -  how much we value it, how much we neglect it - to perhaps join up with others; figure out what our assets are and what things need to happen in our own local community that - scaled up - can actually give us the green blue dream that I think we all share.

Aline responds:

Thank you. What a great gift, what a great gift. My water is flowing here.

I think some of my elders who would weep to listen to you, Joanna, and to see what you are sharing with us here. This is just like the cycle of the water. I keep referencing back to how it was, but it is not that way and this is a very beautiful thing that you're saying: yes, we have gone off in this industrial world and we are coming back to the good teachings, the good ways, in a new way. It's brilliant and it's inspiring, it's wonderful. We talked yesterday about our responsibility.

I just hold my hands up to you for doing the work that you're doing, because this is taking care of seven generations and more. This is it. You're doing it. and it's brilliant.

Joanna:

Well, it certainly has brought a lot of people together in so many interesting ways, and I think the community has felt the joy of participating. And I certainly have just loved being a part of it and getting to know people and all the expertise that people have brought, because it's very interdisciplinary. I think you're absolutely right. It is inspired by more of an indigenous way of listening to understand where water comes from and where it goes and what we need to do, instead of conveying it away. To stay in place and create that space.

Because in cities, we don't have the right balance. We are very much out of step that way. It creates the water gathering - around the water - taking care of it.