Some years ago, our species climbed out of the trees and retreated into caves. Personally, I've never gotten over it. I miss living with plants.
Maybe it's a sign that I'm disconnected from the landscape, but I'd love to live in a house covered with plants. A house like that would help me feel part of the natural world, rather than part of technology. After all, the city is technology - it's all about human-built systems, functioning at peak efficiency to replicate those functions formerly performed by the natural world. Don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. I like technology. But it's not what I'm all about. I'm about leaf litter, and worms, and tomatoes, and all that good stuff.
I'm not alone in my desire to live among plants. Many people want ivy to grow on their homes. And not just on houses. There's something about plant-covered walls that make large buildings seem inviting, approachable. Architects call this "bringing down the scale of a building." City planners respond to this need by requiring trellises on some buildings, especially on multifamily residences (huge blocks of apartment buildings). Builders respond grudgingly. Check out the pitiful cupful of dirt at the base of the trellis at left. I feel sorry for that plant.
When it comes to respecting plants, architects usually don't do much better than builders. They often draw elaborate trellises on their drawings. Then they'll draw some generic plants on their drawings and refer to them disparagingly as "growy things." The plants are an afterthought. Like on the beautiful trellis below: How would a plant even get up there?
Sometimes this is just self-deprecating humor, a nod to the more specialized field of landscape architecture. But it's also a response to the dire warnings of structural engineers, bricklayers, and all kinds of other contractors: Plants destroy houses. Ivy, for example, has little feet that pulls the weatherproof outer surface off walls, exposing the wall's vulnerable interior.
Other plants can damage buildings in other ways Wisteria pulls structures apart. Hedges trap moisture near wood walls, causing them to rot. Roots and vines will seek out a crack, then pry it open as the plant grows. Even my favorite little mountain flower, the saxifrage, comes from the latin meaning "rock breaker."
But some innovative designers are trying to break down that barrier between garden and home. They're using new techniques that allow plants to grow directly on walls, where a highly engineered layer of construction materials protects the wall itself from the plants. Below, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, France.
In other projects, the plants are held away from the building on a stand-alone metal screen. Below, the Capitol Hill Library in Seattle hopes to be completely covered in vines some day. There are several inches of air circulating between the plants and the brick wall.
In some places, you can do it without the building. Check out the "living wall" in the photo below. I don't know how these plants get the minerals they'd normally attain from the soil. But it sure looks cool:
I remember reading an essay by E.B. White from his collection, One Man's Meat. He had recently retired to a small Florida town near the Everglades. He described how, down there, plants thrived in every crack in the sidewalk, consumed buildings on the edge of town. In short, nature would consume this village in a heartbeat. The moment the citizenry put down their machetes, they'd be buried in greenery.
There's a the old frontiersman's fear of wilderness in that observation. But I think White also admired that wilderness for its tenacity, its fecundity. Personally, I find nature's resiliency comforting. And I don't see any reason to wait for civilization to collapse before we can bring nature into our cities. Really, nature can be quite a polite houseguest. It requires so little of us. Just a crack in the wall.
After following green roof and living wall designs for years, I got a kick out of a recent article in the Seattle Times. Perhaps this is the next frontier:
Seattle's parks program has been demolishing a lot of houses lately. Each time it purchases land for a new "pocket park," there's a house that needs to come down. And increasingly, people are choosing to leave portions of the existing foundations to help define public spaces in the park's gardens.
In the park pictured above, most of the foundation had to be demolished. Then the contractors recreated portions of the foundation wall to create a sense of space in the center of the park. As I stand in the middle of this park, I can't help but feel I'm playing house. I imagine the kitchen, the bedrooms, check out the view from the back porch. I feel a little sad for the people who lived here before. Did they want to leave? Were they forced into a smaller house, or into the suburbs? But the walls also make me feel happy. There's a spectacular view from this park, and through someone's selflessness, this private property became democratized, became the property of the everyone. It's not easy to build parks in the city. Something has to die. It's only right to honor this house by celebrating its foundations.
At Gasworks Park, a large concrete wall contains a field. There used to be a big pile of dirt inside these walls, many stories high. Before that, I can't remember what it was, something vaguely industrial, I think. The Parks department sawcut portions of the wall, allowing this aquisition to bleed into the existing Gaswork's park. They left enough of the wall to create a sense of space. Inside, they sculpted the earth into interesting berms, shaped earthen hills designed to contain stormwater runoff. Depending on where you stand on a berm, you either feel contained the walls, or you can look out over them.
There are lots of ways to end the wall too. You can sawcut it, for a crisp entrance. Or, you can break it down in a landscape bed.
These projects show how an existing wall can contribute a sense of space to gardens and parks.
So I'm giddy with excitement about a new property recently aquired by the city. There are a couple of houses on the property, and a network of existing concrete walls. These are no ordinary foundation walls though. They seem to be the remains of a long-gone full-height garage. But absent their roof, they create a series of outdoor rooms with a quality unlike that of any other park I've seen. Consider this outdoor room: It has the bones of a courtyard in an old Italian Piazza. It just needs a little love. I love the windows, no headers, open to the sky. Aren't these walls just itching to be covered with golden hops, or bright red collegiate ivy?
Check out the old driveway. A small grove of trees grows in the middle of it. I love the idea of planting a grove of trees right in the middle of the entrance path. It says: You are entering the domain of the natural world. It speaks of a post-apocalyptic eden.
I saw a similar gesture in Fremont Peak Park. You have to walk around the trees. Check out what it looks like in a finished park:
But what I love best about this property is the story it tells. The family that owned these houses asserted itself on the land, spelled out its name on a hillside, sliced itself into strange, narrow and diagonal spaces with bold rows of trees. It's like a miniature Versailles built by hippy children of a senile timber magnate, a blank checkbook hanging from his limp hand. The only thing by his deathbed is a coffee table book on Picasso - the children memorized it without the guidance of art counselors. In their naivete, they created our little neighborhood Xanadu.
Just to leave this family's footprint in the final design would make this park a magical place.
Last week I discussed how cities can turn to gardens to help conserve water and reduce the strain on systems designed to take excess water to the sea. You can read the previous post here.
The photo above shows a variation on the classic ditch, part of a massive infrastructure project designed to master stormwater runoff in Seattle's Broadview neighborhood.
You remember ditches, right? They used to look like this:
Then people filled them in with dirt and gravel. This increased the parking. But the dirt compacted beneath the cars, and soon these surfaces too became impenetrable to water. That's why many streets now look like this:
The ecological future here is all about reconstructing the past. That's what engineers are realizing when it comes to stormwater management. The old world was squishy, absorbed the rain and let it out with a slow trickle and a sigh. The new world is fast like a waterslide, sending the whole storm sloshing into the ocean at once. So now that we know the old way worked better, we're trying to reconstruct it. The problem is, there's only a fraction of the land available to do that essential work. So the solutions must be highly engineered. And to my delight, those solutions look less like a public works project and more like a garden.
Seattle's Broadview neighborhood makes up much of the watershed feeding the creek running through Carkeek Park. The creek is a beautiful salmon spawning stream that runs through a lovely forest. But when there's a storm, the storm water mixes with sewage and coats the lovely estuary with toilet paper and you-know-what. Lawn fertilizers, weed killers, and pet waste all fed into the stream. The stream then meanders in picturesque oxbows across a beach where children play.
Carkeek Park, Photo by Jess, Beemouse Labs, shared via Flickr
So the city dug up all the streets and rebuilt them from scratch. The ditches are back, but their updated, radically more functional and beautiful than the old slots-in-the-yard that I remember from my youth.
Photo by Seattle Public Utilities
And while they are essentially infrastructure, they are also part ecological system, and part garden, because they provide such visual delight.
The flat streets were completely ripped up and rebuilt. Their new job was to collect rainwater. On the downhill side (left side of picture below), there's a big ditch, planted extensively with native plants and mulched heavily. There's no curb on this side, so that rainwater can sheet off into the ditch. The road slopes towards the ditch, rather than crowning in the middle as is typical. On the uphill side (right side of picture below), there's a sidewalk, then another, smaller ditch to catch the runoff from the yards on the uphill side.
Narrow new driveways were allowed where old ones existed, but everyone else was told to bring their cars in by the alley. Most alleys these days are underused and weedy, so this must have taken some getting used to. When the construction work wiped out everyone's mailboxes, the city replaced them by consolidating them in nodes, like the forest service consolidates heavily-used campsites in a pristine mountain wilderness.
Make no mistake, this was a bold decision, costing loads of money. A neighbor said it cost half a million dollars per block. And not everyone liked the idea. Ditches eliminated parking on one side of the street, and chopped some people's front yards in half (though only land in the right-of-way was reclaimed). There's an inherent conflict between accessing these houses and maintaining the continuity of the ditches. So the city built new concrete steps with welded tube-steel rails for everyone. Each city-built walkway is a little bridge, with a short section of culvert running below.
On the uphill-downhill streets, the ditches are larger. Here, the job was to accept run-off from the flat streets and slow it down as it went downhill. If possible, stormwater would be completely eliminated, allowed to seep into the groundwater. The ditches along the uphill-downhill streets contain chains of descending pools, built out of these elements:
A protected drain at the bottom;
dividing walls in the middle, separating the ditch into a series of terraced pools; and
a feeder culvert at the top, bringing in water from the side streets.
The project does have some problems. In some areas where there is no curb, vehicles are once again encroaching on the landscape. One neighbor complained that the city has no enforcement mechanism for protecting its plantings, and no funding to maintain them, though they're designed to require no maintenance. It seems the city still needs to clarify how much private property owners are responsible for maintaining the overall system. Below, a car compacts the new, highly-engineered soil.
People in the neighborhood have mostly come to appreciate the massive project. For one thing, it's eliminated a lot of basement flooding, according to one neighbor. He estimates the project increased his property value by quite a bit. As for myself, the neighborhood has become a major walking destination. I love to see how things are growing, how the city has slowly added new blocks to the project. I'm excited to learn the city plans to try a similar project in a very urban location next, much closer to downtown Seattle.
This project is forcing me to rethink what a garden can be. My garden works to provide my family with food, or flowers. This project is a garden too, for it also provides those things, though the food is mostly for wildlife. But there's a new inspiration in my garden diary these days. The hydrologic cycle, and stormwater management. These cycles are governed by their own unique rules. Leonardo DaVinci spent the last years of his life trying to discover those rules. When taken as inspiration, stormwater management can lead to new kinds of gardens with a fresh capacity to surprise and delight us.
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