Princeton Finally Plants its Fuel Tank Raingarden

The raingarden in front of the municipality's fuel tank on Witherspoon Street finally got planted. Like just about every piece of real estate in Princeton, large or small, this raingarden has a long and turbulent history. It was presumably created to receive runoff from a roof the town had built over the fuel tank. The roof was meant to protect staff from rain while they poured fossil fuel in their gas tanks, but spurred passionate complaints from neighbors, who complained about the visual blight upon a main entryway into town. 

Thus began a long period of deliberation and rethinking, leading to the removal of the much-maligned roof, and consideration of whether to spend even more money to move the raingarden somewhere else, for whatever reason.

While humans hemmed and hawed, nature began populating the bare dirt with various weeds, leading to a post on this blog called Princeton's Fuel Tank Raingarden Wannabe, identifying the various weeds and discussing which would be worth keeping. If one knows and loves plants--knowing and loving being very much intertwined--it's pretty easy to develop a new raingarden planting simply by editing what pops up on its own, augmented by taking excess plants from an existing raingarden and planting them in another. Planting one raingarden makes the next one all the easier to create at no cost beyond time spent.

The town has its own logic, however, for better or worse. The raingarden was left untended for a couple years until the brick facade disguising the fuel tank was completed, and then in mid-October a host of plants were purchased and installed, along with a thick layer of mulch. 

Soft rush were densely planted at the lower end, with purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans on the slopes. 

Though the men may not have been overjoyed at the task, it was good to see public works employees working with hand tools, away from all the rumbling machines that burn the fossil fuels hidden behind this raingarden. 

Beyond the benefits of raingardens--filtration of runoff, groundwater recharge, food for insects and birds--they are above all a quiet space. Raucous lawn mowers and leaf blowers are of no use in a raingarden, where only quiet tasks like weeding and planting are needed. 

The relentless racket of custodial lawncare that people so resent in our neighborhoods is the sound of machines simplifying and dominating nature while they feed climate change. When was the last time you saw an employee, public or private, quietly using hand tools in a garden? That's what made this scene along Witherspoon Street special. 

Princeton's Fuel Tank Raingarden Wannabe

Why would a plant lover be drawn to this desolate scene of concrete and asphalt? Because there's a raingarden behind that fence, or at least a raingarden wannabe, and that means I'm seeing not what is, which is pretty drab, but what could be, which is a dynamic, jubilant planting of native wildflowers, grasses and shrubs filling that skinny raingarden squeezed between the sidewalk and the town's fuel tank. The fuel tank was for awhile serving double duty, fueling town vehicles while its appearance fueled controversy in the neighborhood. A fine rain garden planting could go a long way towards healing the discontent, in my humble, totally plant-biased opinion.

The first good news is that the fresh layer of asphalt there appears to be appropriately tilted to shed its runoff towards the raingarden. What is a raingarden, after all, if the rain that falls on the surrounding topography doesn't flow towards it?

For some reason the raingarden hasn't been planted yet, so the plants have gone ahead and started planting themselves. It's looking a little sparse thus far. Or you could say that the plants are social distancing.

Whenever I see plants trying to colonize bare dirt, I think of people who live in an emotionally impoverished situation. Back when I was in that predicament, I was drawn to places like this. Weeds trying to grow in parched ground were my friends and fellow travelers. Maybe that's why I can remember plant names when most people struggle, because the plants aren't just variations on green. They touch something deeper in me.

This late-flowering thoroughwort is a keeper--a native wildflower whose name is unlikely to flow smoothly from many tongues. It grows like a weed, and often in weedy places, like abandoned fields or roadsides, but can sometimes achieve great elegance of form when it becomes covered with plates of white flowers in late summer. It shows up early, but blooms late. Thus the name.

Here are the leaves of mugwort, which adds no color and spreads aggressively underground, taking over neglected raingardens over time. It's a force for monoculture and monotony that must be countered early and often.

Smaller scale weeds are clustered here, close to the ground, with dandelion on the lower right, a mock strawberry in the middle, and one 3-seeded mercury on the left. When I see one or two mock strawberries like this, I'm also seeing five years hence when it will have spread to coat the ground in an unattractive and inedible way. That increases the motivation to be proactive and pull it out now, before the task becomes overwhelming. This ability to imagine the future, learned in a garden, is directly translatable to global issues like climate change, where the job only becomes harder the longer one waits. 

Lots of homeowners puzzle over what to do with hundreds of oak seedlings in their yards, when everyone is telling them we need to plant more trees. Most tree species don't need help. They plant themselves, often in inconvenient places, like this raingarden.

Playing the editor, I'd say this nonnative red clover is a keeper as well, but pull the tall sweet clover at the other end of the raingarden. Sweet clover can be kind of pretty in a gangly way, but it is one of those midwestern and western weeds that appear to be expanding eastward, like teasel, Queen Anne's Lace, knapweed, and wooly mullein. Having lived in the midwest, I've seen how they can start to take over.

Leaping into the void in plants and action a couple months ago, I pushed some "live stakes" of buttonbush into the bottom of the raingarden. Despite the poor, hardened soil, they have sprouted. Here again, I'm seeing not so much the less than impressive seedling but instead the 8 foot high shrub it could become if it's allowed to get well established.

Just up Witherspoon Street, at the Princeton Recreation Dept. headquarters next to the community pool, is a demonstration of how gardens can look if there's someone knowledgeable taking care of them year after year. There's some serious tending going on here. Even the scarily aggressive variegated goutweed (whitish leaves on the left), which tends to take over gardens, is neatly contained in a discreet clump. These gardens owe their existence and beauty

to Vikki, whose job description in the Recreation Department probably has nothing to do with plants. From what I've seen over the years, it's clear that Vikki is one of the few people in town who is hard-wired to have a soft spot for public gardening, like Polly Burlingham with her hanging baskets downtown, and the various school gardeners, and like Dorothy Mullen was until she left our world earlier this year. I'd say that all it takes is love, and from that all things follow--vision, knowledge, persistence, strategic timing.

Maybe the sad, forsaken raingarden wannabe just a block away will somehow become loved ground. It's got "good bones"--sun, inputs of moisture. Good things could happen.

Three Ways a House Can Feed a Raingarden

(First, a note: The Historical Society of Princeton is hosting Community Days the first Saturday of every month out at its Updike Farmstead on Quaker Road. More info at this link.)

Last month, the Updike Farmstead Community Day featured yours truly. I had planned to give three different presentation, but since most people came to hear about Herrontown Woods and the Veblen legacy, I ended up giving that presentation twice.

We did get outside long enough to check out the trees and learn about raingarden logic. The two most prized trees on the property--evidenced by their stature and the steel cables someone ran up their trunks long ago to serve as lightning rods--are a gorgeous sugar maple near the house and a large white ash along the driveway. As the emerald ash borer advances towards Princeton, the ash will need to be treated with emamectin benzoate, a systemic insecticide injected into the base of the tree every few years. Arbor-Mectin is one of the brand names. A fuller discussion of the issue can be found towards the bottom at this link.

The Updike Farm house is a great example for learning how to site a raingarden on your property. That circle in the foreground is the spot I suggested, in a low spot about 15 feet from the house.

Why that particular location next to the Updike Farm house? Because that's where the house could feed the raingarden in three different ways. For one, there's this pipe which drains a quarter of the main roof. That's a lot of rainwater to feed the garden.

Even better, there's a sump pump that pumps water from the basement out a pipe next to the foundation. You can see the deterioration of the paint at the base of the wall due to that moisture. It would be better for the house, and conducive for a raingarden, to instead pipe that water out to the raingarden location, where it can do some good. A sump pump continues to pump water out of a basement for a number of days after a rain, extending the period during which the raingarden will get supplied with water.

Also auspicious for keeping a raingarden watered, even during prolonged droughts, is the set of air conditioners lined up on that side of the house. Air conditioners remove water from the indoor air as part of the cooling process, and in the basement of the Updike farm house, we discovered that that condensate drains to the sump pump, which then pumps it out of the house. That means the pump could supply water to the garden even during droughts. That consistent, automatic watering will keep the native plants growing vigorously and reduce the weeding required.

Seems like a perfect spot for a raingarden.



The Mountain Lakes House raingarden, similarly sited, is a good model.

More about the Updike Farmstead: If you go out there, or stop by on the way to Route 1, check out the barn renovation.

It's good to see an old building getting the attention it needs and deserves.

A new foundation is being laid.

With the bike trail along Quaker Road completed, it's now possible to bike out to Updike Farm, then continue to the canal,

and bike back to Princeton along the towpath.

Public Raingarden Bulldozed

(See followup post for an update.)

You know, it's been a beautiful summer, and I really don't feel like being upset. But this past Thursday, on August 7, the raingarden at the Princeton Housing Authority's Spruce Circle on Harrison Street was bulldozed. Just like that. Gone. For six years it provided beauty to passersby, and food and habitat for wildlife. This time of year is peak flowering, with Joe-Pye-Weed, cutleaf coneflower, boneset and swamp milkweed providing color and feeding pollinators that find precious little to feed on elsewhere. In an urban landscape dominated by trees and turf, the raingarden offered an oasis for the dwindling numbers of monarch butterflies that come our way each year.

When I discovered the destruction, the sign was still there. It would have been thoughtful if the head of maintenance, whoever that may be, had read the sign first, to find out what the garden's function was, and who planted it. The next day, the sign too had been ripped out.

I called the Housing Authority, and was told by an assistant administrator, who could not have been more indifferent, that anything planted on their property is under their control, and can be destroyed at will. I explained that it had been planted and maintained for six years by volunteers, and asked if she might feel any regret? She said she would be lying if she were to say she did. Since I had called a few minutes after the office closed, she said she was doing me a favor by answering the phone.

It's true the housing authority has control over its property, but not completely true. That land is public land. It's not owned by the recently hired maintenance supervisor. The raingarden was approved in 2008 by the executive director, Scott Parsons, and the Princeton Housing Authority board. It was faithfully maintained by volunteers. Such decisions can't be reversed on someone's whim, or so you would think.

Having planted a lot of raingardens on public land, in three different towns, I've developed a thick skin. The first time one was accidentally mowed by a new and uninformed employee, in Durham, NC, it felt like a punch to the gut. I discovered, however, that gardens are resilient. They grow back from a mowing. So two years ago when I came upon a man trimming the Harrison St. raingarden with a chainsaw, I calmly explained that the wildflowers are not a hedge, and we joked about it later. But bulldozing represents a new level of ignorance and indifference.

One of the ironies is that I had just received an invitation from Princeton's mayor to a Volunteer Thank You Party. Well, the raingarden was a volunteer of sorts, doing everything right. In addition to the interest, beauty and habitat it provided, it also capturing runoff from the roofs to reduce downstream flooding. What a nice thank you it received, from a bulldozer. 

And here, flashing back to 2008, is an example of community volunteers doing everything right. When Curtis Helm told me about his idea of planting a demonstration raingarden at Spruce Circle, I helped choose the spot and facilitated the permission process. Curtis carefully regraded the soil to hold just the right amount of runoff, so the water would seep into the ground after a day or two, feeding the plants but killing any hapless mosquito larvae before they could mature. By tempting mosquitoes to lay their eggs in ephemeral water, a raingarden actually reduces the urban mosquito population.

Surrounded by buildings and streets whose imperviousness displaces nature and contributes to downstream flooding, and whose emissions contribute to destabilizing climate, the raingarden acts as a buffer, welcoming nature and slowing the water down. In a time of increasing extremes, we need more raingardening, not less.

Curtis arranged a generous donation of plants from Pinelands Nursery, and paid for the sign with his own money. The raingarden was part of a Green Home and Garden Tour that year. Photos of the garden were used in presentations at conferences, and also appear in the Rain Garden Manual of New Jersey (pp. 14 and 50), which is accessible on websites in NJ, Connecticut, Maine and elsewhere. When Curtis left town to take a position with Philadelphia's parks department, I weeded the garden each year and made sure the roof downspouts were still feeding it water.

It takes a certain breed of person to keep a garden going, year after year. So many distractions in life, so many demands, and the weeds take advantage. There are some successes in Princeton. The gardens that serve as an attractive entryway to the town pool and the recreation building thrive because of the volunteer t.l.c. of Vikki Caines, a rec. dept. employee, and the Dogwood Garden Club. But other gardens have recently lost their longtime stewards. The splendid gardens at Riverside Elementary are losing Dorothy Mullen after so many years of devotion. The Barbara Sigmund memorial park on Hamilton Ave. lost Polly Burlingham's stewardship, in part due to a lack of volunteer help. Other plantings have gone for years without adequate attention. The memorial dogwoods at Princeton Battlefield languish beneath a tyranny of freeloading vines while acres of ahistoric lawn get mowed. The Harrison Street Park plantings got a burst of volunteer attention their first year, but then most of those gardens were left to the weeds and the unskilled grounds crew.

The lack of botanical training for employees charged with caring for our public spaces has always been hard to fathom. Princeton has an arborist, but no one versed in plants that happen to lack cellulose. Usually, the lack of training expresses itself through the steady decline of any planting other than trees and turf. But now we find that this lack of knowledge and training has expressed itself as a willingness to destroy even those gardens well cared for by volunteers.

What we end up with is "greenery", for example this mound of invasive Japanese honeysuckle vine that suffocated whatever shrub was planted there long ago, and now survives by being sufficiently boring and mindless.

The Princeton Housing Authority has been incommunicado this week as it moves into new offices. Their executive director only works one day a week, and has yet to reply to requests for information. All indications, however, suggest that this was a pointless act of destruction.

So, really, what does Princeton value? Does it value the time, passion, knowledge, and energy its volunteers give to the community? Does it value the stream--Harry's Brook--that this raingarden was aiding by holding back runoff? Whoever destroyed this garden thought no one would care, that the Housing Authority Board and town council would simply make excuses or look the other way. We'll find out soon whether the town rebuilds this raingarden, or if public spiritedness is to be turned into a slurry of mud headed towards Harry's Brook.

Update, 8/14: The Housing Authority's executive director, Scott Parsons, responded soon after this post was written. He explained that there was a misunderstanding with his maintenance staff, but that there wasn't much that could be done. He apologized for the misunderstanding.

Feeding Raingardens: When Disconnection is a Good Thing

This post is about two different kinds of disconnection, one good, the other not so good. Now, every time I start saying what something is "about", I am stopped in my tracks by the memory of an english professor, Russell Fraser, who would say emphatically that a poem is not "about" any one thing, in that a good poem comes from a place so deep and works at so many levels that it's naive for the conscious mind to declare what the poem is actually about.

Take as a for instance this newly constructed raingarden behind the PNC's new bank at Princeton Shopping Center. Not exactly a poem, but what is it about? For the designer, who may not have even visited the site, it was about satisfying regulations, at least on paper--regulations that require that newly paved areas not add runoff to local streams. For the contractor, it was a matter of nominally following the design, installing the called for curbcuts and greenery, and being done with it.

At a deeper level, this raingarden demonstrates what happens when people are disconnected from the underlying meaning of their work. The whole idea here is to direct runoff into the raingarden, where the water can be filtered and seep into the ground, essentially "disconnecting" that portion of pavement from the matrix of stormsewer pipes that would otherwise send untreated runoff pouring directly into nearby Harry's Brook, adding to downstream flooding. Look closely, and you'll see how this good sort of disconnection was foiled by a lack of empathy for the basic processes of nature, one of which is that water flows downhill. The runoff can't reach the raingarden because the turf and stone around it are higher than the pavement.

At another level, then, this raingarden is about how a big investment in regulation, design and installation, well intended on its face, can come to nothing.

A bit shadowy here in the photo, but you can see the surprisingly small amount of pavement uphill of the raingarden. The plants really need what little runoff the pavement can provide.

This second curbcut is the most obviously dysfunctional one. A visit during a rain will show runoff simply flowing past it, as if the curb had no cut at all. I suppose as parents we sometimes expect of kids what their nature does not allow, and this curbcut is expecting water to flow uphill. Not likely. It comes down to empathy for the physical world--being able to imagine the flow of water, and the consequences of gravity.

Meanwhile, up Bunn Drive from the Shopping Center, in the parking lot for Stone Hill Church, the raingardens were designed with much more care. The mounds of green and gold are switchgrass--one of the native prairie grasses that works well as an ornamental.

The long raingarden is lower than the pavement, and the curbcuts actually let the water in.

This last photo, back at the Shopping Center, shows how the best way to disconnect can be simply not to connect in the first place. Where no curb was built, the grass meets the pavement directly and runoff can flow into the turf, then be absorbed into the ground. Where the curb ends, where the informality of curbless streets are allowed, better runoff management begins. A chance configuration, with pavement higher than the lawn next to it, is working better than the fancy design of curbcuts and raingarden just a hundred feet away. Here's to the serendipity that sometimes comes from "not doing", and here's to PNC being required to call the contractor back in to make their raingarden actually work.

Weeding Princeton's Fuel Tank Raingarden

When neighbor's complained about the appearance of the fuel tank on Witherspoon Street, the town responded by removing the fueling station's roof, adding a brick facade, and planting the raingarden that had been built to catch and filter runoff from the pavement. 

With the raingarden looking good in its first full year, the intended plants tidily mulched and flourishing, you'd think that it's time to sit back and enjoy nature's beneficence.

But as a gardener who has seen many a raingarden succumb to weeds, I could not help but notice the first signs that a silent, weedy insurrection was in the works. Here is a small patch of mugwort, planning a rhizomatous takeover.

Here's another little, harmless-looking cluster of mugwort next to a lovely St Johnswort shrub. And what's that grasslike plant in the background? That would be nutsedge, easy to pull but also with an underground network of roots that is hard to exhaust. If allowed to grow, it too will spread everywhere. 

The weeds look harmless when there are just a few, but a gardener can extrapolate in the imagination from a little to a lot. I couldn't help myself, and intervened. How many gardens are at such an early stage when thirty minutes of weeding can nip invasion in the bud? Here are horse nettle, mugwort and nutsedge. Feel for the triangular stem on the nutsedge. "Sedges have edges."

Here is white clover, which is benign in a lawn but muddles things in a flower bed.

On the left is a vetch, not crown vetch thankfully, but still worth pulling. 

I pulled pretty much every weed except the nutsedge, whose takeover will hopefully be forestalled by the designated caretaker, if any. Afterwards, the raingarden looked to most eyes exactly like it had a half hour prior. The reward of proactive action is in imagining all the future work that has just been avoided. There will be more work, surely, but much less. 

Maybe someone with designated responsibility would have done the weeding anyway. Nice to think but hard to count on. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the new fire station, another raingarden was planted at some point. Lots of good stuff growing, but much more intimidating in terms of weeds. It shows what happens when the weeds are allowed to gain a foothold.

The pink is crown vetch, an aggressive plant originally introduced to the U.S. to control roadside erosion. 

And then there's birdsfoot trefoil, originally introduced to the U.S. as nutritious forage for cattle.

And relentless bindweed growing up and over the native swamp milkweed. 

Subduing these three tough customers would take some major work, which makes it all the more amazing to be able to weed the other raingarden and feel like one has the upper hand. 

All of this leads to a point, or two, made before, that regulations require the planting of raingardens in the name of reduced flooding and increased water quality, yet maintenance operations are set up to handle only the simplest of landscapes--turf and trees. Raingardens are a complex community of plants, not a monoculture. They don't respond well to "mow, blow, and go." The person who cares for them needs to be more physician than custodian. They can be planted by people who don't really know the plants, but they need to be cared for by people who do, in a culture that devalues informed maintenance. 

How To Rescue a Raingarden

It's doing better now. The blue vervain has rebounded impressively. After being mowed down for most of a year, the native grasses--big bluestem, wild rye, and switchgrass--had looked like gonners, but they too have reappeared in numbers and are reaching for the sky.

Most raingardens, like many Americans, lack medical insurance. There's no money to restore their health when the weeds take over. There's money to design them, and install them, and sometimes even regulations that require they be planted. But to keep them thriving and looking good? Well, they're pretty much on their own.

If you think about it, most urban landscapes are cared for by people who know next to nothing about plants. If the medical profession were run like the landscaping business, hospitals would be manned by custodians equipped with leaf blowers and weed whippers, and anyone who came in with a medical issue would be left to fester, then eventually mowed down when they became unsightly. Under such conditions, trees can survive, and some foundation shrubs, but if you're a plant that's neither tree nor shrub nor turfgrass, life could be short.

The landscape architect who designed this raingarden, in a parking lot a few blocks from my house, likely had considerable training, and hopefully makes a decent living, but the designer is long gone and the garden will only survive if it is maintained. Whoever maintains it must know and be able to recognize, at every stage of their growth, not only the intended plants the designer was familiar with, but also the many kinds of weeds that threaten to overwhelm the intended plants. There's no time to pull every last weed, so efficient maintenance requires knowing which weeds pose a serious threat to a balanced planting, and which are benign. And by the way, all the money was spent on design and installation. Nothing's left to pay the people who determine the plantings fate and need the greatest knowledge.

I should have intervened sooner. Instead, a few years ago, having urged those responsible, to no avail, to hire either me or someone else who could give the raingarden the skilled care it needed, I watched as the intended plants got overwhelmed by a bumper crop of 7 foot high pigweed and lambsquarters. The next year, the landscape crew noticed how weedy the raingarden had become, so they mowed it all down and started treating it like a lawn. That's the classic progression: garden to weeds to lawn. The lack of plant knowledge makes most landscape care like a light switch. There are two positions: on and off. You either let it grow "natural" or mow it down. No selective intervention. Our inner gardens, which is to say our bodies, are cared for by knowledgeable people, who provide skilled medical intervention if need be. Why not a raingarden? The answer is that people matter, while saving a raingarden, like saving a livable planet, is considered optional.

Strangely, I feel lucky. Yes, I'm putting in a half hour here and there of volunteer work because of a culture's disconnect with plants, but one thing I learned from my astronomer father was to make a project more interesting by thinking of it as an experiment. How dramatically will a neglected raingarden respond to a little TLC? How little time can be invested and still get a good result?

There's such pleasure--why don't others feel this?--in rescuing a garden like this. Multiple levels of restoration happen at the same time: beauty, diversity, ecological function. And then there's the strategy, like playing bridge--using finesse to gain the best results with the cards you're dealt, dealing with multiple variables as the drama plays out. A different strategy is applied to each kind of weed. This is wild gardening, not total control. Leave the daisy fleabane with its weedy form but attractive flower. It's not doing any harm and won't take over. Take advantage of last night's rain to pull otherwise stubborn weeds out of the softened earth. Find satisfaction in the ease of undercutting a dandelion with a shovel blade. Catch mugwort or Canada thistle early, before they have a chance to spread. Feel the deeply American frontier mix of wit and muscle, mind and body. Live the wisdom of a hand-me-down phrase like "a stitch in time saves nine."

Otherwise, you end up with large swaths smothered with bindweed,

or carpeted with crown vetch. These will take something more than a clean undercutting with a shovel.

The solitary lambsquarter poses no threat at this point, and could end up in a salad.

The amaranth is already some insect's salad.

The smartweed (Polygonum) could prove aggressive, but the Japanese beetles are doing a good job of weakening its spreading tendencies. May as well leave it for now.

Velvet leaf isn't doing any harm, and will likely be eclipsed as the intended plants gain dominance.

Pilewort and

horseweeds are native weeds that grow tall and gangly, contributing to a weedy look if left in.

The catnip is staying for the meantime, though as a mint it could prove aggressive.

The Queen Anne's Lace (the same species that makes the carrots we eat) is pretty, but I've seen it take over fields in the midwest. Maybe remove it after the flowers fade.

There's no perfection here, and no certainty that each decision is the right one, but the results have been heartening, with the original plantings showing more resiliency than expected.

Next time I'm walking the dog over that way, maybe I'll remember to take pruners to trim back the redbud. Perhaps it should be called "casual insistence", this integration of garden rescue into the fabric of one's life, pulling weeds every week or two while the dog waits patiently. There are a few of us in town hard-wired to care in this way, with inner clocks that say "time to go take a look", who find this sort of casually serious and seriously casual persistence with a garden to be satisfying. Perhaps someday more people, maybe even some professional landscape crews, will discover the pleasure, and fewer raingardens will be lost to the weeds.

In the meantime, breathe in the cool air of an early summer evening, and feel like a conductor molding nature's growth force into a symphony, orchestrating the comeback of a raingarden nearly lost to the world.