By Kevin Brooks
Anyone who has found themselves in the backyard with their toddler has most likely come across the Garden Song, a children’s classic sung by the late John Denver on the Muppet Show. The song’s lyrics speak to planting a garden while caring for Mother Earth.
Many of the projects we build have some landscaping and irrigation component to them that we also “plant” at the end of the project. Often, the details of this scope of work get overlooked as we rush across the finish line towards the coveted certificate of substantial completion and close-out of the job. There can, however, be many sustainable features to a typical landscaping and irrigation scope of work. Moreover, whereas in the past the green focus has been on water conservation and efficient irrigation technologies, today’s sustainability focus has evolved to include landscaping features. Below we look at two specific landscaping applications: utilizing landscape features to collect and treat surface water runoff and the actual selection of landscape plantings.
Roof gardens are a popular option to reduce surface water from collecting
Surface Water
A common civil engineering design challenge associated with today’s development is how to collect surface water runoff, especially from impervious surfaces such as roofs and parking lots. Different applications can be used to reduce the quantity of surface water that need to be collected. Extensive roof gardens can be planted on a building’s roof, such as on the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, or pervious pavements used in lieu of typical asphalt pavements for parking lot surfaces, as at the Kaiser Modesto hospital. Both of these applications have been featured in previous Green Corner articles. The challenge remains on what to do with the surface water that is nonetheless generated,
and thus needs to be collected and ultimately treated (or discharged to the watershed, i.e. rivers, lakes, etc.). In the case of surface water collected from areas where automobiles are – parking lots and parking garages – many municipalities require some type of pre-treatment prior to discharge of the collected surface water to the public storm and/or sanitary sewer system. One conventional pre-treatment application is a sand and oil separator – essentially a holding tank with baffles that force the separation of solids (sand) and contaminants (oils) from the surface water. Contaminated surface water enters the holding tank at one end and leaves in a pre-treated state at the other end.
Stay tuned for Part II where we’ll address rain gardens and planting options! Have you used any of these gardening techniques for your own home?
(Photograph from: http://www.treklens.com/gallery/Asia/China/photo298127.htm)
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