This week’s Friday Film features a look at a series of rain gardens designed to capture water from a roof. This video is presented by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust as part of their ‘Step by Step Rain Gardens‘ series. In this installed garden, the rain falls down the downspout, across into a raised, circular planter filled [...]
Today’s Friday Film features an inside look at the New Wild Garden from the 2011 Chelsea RHS Flower Show designed by Nigel Dunnett filmed by Dusty Gedge. The garden features a great many elements for wildlife including a stone wall for habitat with built-in insect shelters as well as an insect wall for solitary bees and [...]
News An Urban Jungle for the 21st Century:: An interesting article from the New York Times, this piece features a 10-year development plan in Singapore which aims to go from “a garden city” to a “city in a garden” which means increasing the greenery and biodiversity of plants and wildlife around the city. Cities could [...]
Everyone knows it rains a lot in Seattle and with the Puget Sound on our doorstep, stormwater runoff can have a huge impact on the aquatic ecosystem. In the Puget Sound there are octopus, sharks, harbor seals, sea anemones, sea stars, crabs, clams, salmon and something called sea cauliflower. This multitude of wildlife is important [...]
As the 2011 Integrated Habitats Design Competition is getting launched, I’m looking at the winning entries from the 2010 competition in a series of posts. The Overflow Carpark designers asks a very important question: “While it may prove impossible to eliminate the need for cars and carparks in the near future, how can we reinterpret their rather [...]
News Conservation, nature and cities — or Learning to Love the Pigeon:: This is a wonderful post on the Connected by Nature blog about the ‘Pigeon Paradox’. New scientific field will study ecological importance of sounds:: From the ScienceBlog website, this article discusses an emerging scientific field called Soundscape Ecology which “will focus on what [...]
News Urban biodiversity beyond the grave:: This story from the BBC features a look at a documentary by a student titled Beyond the Grave. The film aims to show the importance of cemeteries as habitat in urban areas. Included in the story is a short video clip. Urban Ecology:: While not a new broadcast, still an [...]
In Portland, Oregon there are a number of schools who have installed rain gardens. Portland has been one of the leading cities in the world when it comes to stormwater management and has a great number of good examples, some were even featured in the book I mentioned in the previous post, Rain Gardens: Managing [...]
One of the major habitat elements, after food and shelter, comes water. There are two main routes that can provide water, a pond provides constant water while a rain garden provides constantly changing levels of water. There are many great resources for design and installation of both options. PONDS If the goal is to provide [...]
The next post is about rain gardens and ponds and is where habitat, hydrology and stormwater management start to overlap. This is a paper I wrote about the hydrologic cycle that may be helpful to anyone wanting to understand hydrology and why it’s so important that we mitigate the affects of all of our impervious [...]
There are some new resources on the right hand side of this blog that are worth checking out if you have never seen them before. Rain Garden: Handbook for Western Washington Homeowners is an excellent guide for planning a rain garden from the WSU Extension Service. Adding water to a landscape is one of the [...]