Karen: A rain garden is a landscaped area designed to collect rainwater from rooftops or streets and hold it briefly, allowing it to percolate into the soil rather than immediately flowing out into storm drains. Excess storm water runoff from paved surfaces and even suburban lawns contributes to flooding and pollutes our water supply. So the basic idea of a rain garden is to reduce storm water runoff and keep our water supply cleaner. The rain garden was created by digging a shallow depression in the ground and then filling it with a mixture of compost, sand, and topsoil; this mixture allows the garden to drain quickly. A narrow berm surrounds the garden, creating a bowl-like effect when it rains. Our rain garden is planted with prairie wildflowers and grasses. The deep roots of prairie plants are perfect for rain gardens.
We got the idea of installing a rain garden in typical small-town fashion. Late in 2009, Maeve Clark and Jen Jordan appeared on Dottie Ray’s radio program to talk about ECO Iowa City, an alliance between the Iowa City Public Library and the City of Iowa City Public Works Division to promote recycling and conservation. A week later, Holly was on the show to talk about nature books, and Dottie’s enthusiasm about ECO Iowa City sparked Holly’s interest in making the Kuhl House landscaping more environmentally friendly. Maeve and Jen came over to the Press to talk with us about rain gardens, which led Holly to contact Liz Christiansen at UI’s Office of Sustainability and Scott Gritsch at Facilities Management; Liz then notified Jerry Schnoor, several of whose students in his Sustainable Systems class were interested in designing and building a rain garden on campus, and before we knew it, the garden was taking shape, thanks to everyone’s support.
Why was the Kuhl House appropriate for a rain garden?
Holly: Building a rain garden at the Kuhl House was an ideal undertaking for UI Press, especially given our building’s proximity to three areas that remain devastated by the 2008 floods. Press books such as Connie Mutel’s A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 and Paul Christiansen and Mark Müller’s An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants actively promote conservation and preservation with an emphasis on native plants. We love the fact that the Kuhl House, the oldest house in Iowa City that has been so carefully preserved by the University, now hosts such a progressive project as an urban rain garden. The garden, by the way, is dedicated to prairie ecologist Paul Christiansen.
How hard was it to create the rain garden? Who were your partners?
Karen: It wasn’t hard to create the rain garden because Jeremy Bril and his team did all of the work for us! Jeremy and his classmates Spencer Heaton, Peter Kauss, and Kurt Winnike installed the rain garden as one of their projects for the U of Iowa College of Engineering‘s Sustainable Systems course taught by Jerry Schnoor. We decided where the garden should be located and what kinds of plants to get, but Jeremy’s team did the real work of planning and installing the garden. His team calculated the amount of runoff from the roof and determined how many square feet the garden should be, contacted Amy Bouska to test the soil and advise on the best mixture to promote drainage, arranged the delivery of sand and compost, excavated the garden to its proper depth, and helped plant the seedlings. Aside from the College of Engineering and Jeremy’s team, our partners were the U of Iowa Office of Sustainability (Liz Christiansen and Amy Myers), UI Facilities Management (Bob Brooks), ECO Iowa City (Jen Jordan of the City of Iowa City and Maeve Clark of the Iowa City Public Library) and the Iowa Department of Agriculture (Amy Bouska).
Karen Copp, associate director, design and production manager, UI Press
Holly Carver, former director, current Bur Oak Books editor, UI Press
No comments:
Post a Comment