01/28/2015
The following are some letters of support for the integrity of the design of the Riverton School Rain Garden Project.
As you will see this concise observations go well beyond the comments of others which range from "I just don't like it" to "I think it's messy" and the best "It has no aesthetic quality". These comments reflect the continued ignorance people have about the environment. That for some reason the landscapes are something to just look at and not to get a deeper meaning of what our landscapes should be. These people are called surface people, meaning they only care about the outside of things never having the intelligence to look deeper in many aspects of life.
I bet the Butterflies and Bees love the aesthetic quality of the landscape and the other beneficial insects using the leaf cover for their life cycles and surely the birds enjoy the seeds during the long winter months. Oh I forgot some people think the amazing qualities of a functional ecosystem don't belong near the school.
Mark,
I offer this letter in support of maintaining the Riverton School Rain Garden landscape in it's originally conceived, designed and constructed form.
As a NJ licensed Landscape
Architect I recognize that rain gardens are beneficial to the community in a number of valuable ways. They offer a more sustainable way to manage urban storm water runoff while simultaneously minimizing the level of landscape maintenance, soil amendments and other energy-intensive practices. The use of primarily native plantings provides an educational opportunity for students and residents alike, provides a naturalistic setting for our school that is all too often lacking in the built environment, and also provides forage and cover for wildlife including birds and butterflies.
Rain gardens are intended and designed to act as an integrated system involving grading, natural leaf mulch, and ecologically selected plantings.
If any of these aspects of the design are compromised, the functionality of the rain garden as a fully integrated system will likewise be compromised.
Therefore, I would am firmly opposed to the idea that the rain garden might be altered in some way that is not consistent with it's original intent and design.
As a Riverton resident and father of two children that attend the school, it has given me great satisfaction to admire and appreciate the rain garden in it's original form, each time that I walk or drive by. The rain garden is a lovely and functional asset to the Borough and I would actively oppose the idea of compromising the design. If I can assist further in any way, please do not hesitate to ask.
Sincerely,
Douglas C. Cowan
Resident and
NJ Licenced Landscape Architect (NJ Lic #
21AS00078600)
416 Thomas Avenue
Riverton, NJ
November 24, 2014
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing in support of the school rain gardens that are in place at Riverton School. I work with several non-profit organizations which install and maintain rain gardens at schools, parks, farms and on streets and I can attest to their beauty, functional necessity and importance as an educational tool.
The use of rain gardens as a teaching tool is widespread across the United States because of their environmental responsibility and their hands on educational opportunities. They enable students to observe many science lessons in the school environment, from insects to the water cycle, as well as seeing the change of plants over the seasons. Classes are often brought out to conduct lessons around the rain garden, collect data for experiments, and share their knowledge with visitors.
Towns are encouraged to plant rain gardens more often because they require fewer resources than traditional plantings (less water, chemicals, mowing, labor, etc.), reuse rainwater by keeping more water in the garden, infiltrating into the ground, and out of flooded creeks or streams.
The native plants used in these gardens are excellent choices for color, structure, fruit and flower and will benefit native pollinators such as bees, butterflies and birds. Flowers such as milkw**d, joe pye w**d and goldenrod are magnets for butterflies and help support Monarch butterflies and native bees in peril. Serviceberry ia a fantastic small tree for attracting birds and provides fall leaf color. The plants were also excellent choices to teach students about native ecosystems and the regional plants of Southern New Jersey.
Rain Gardens can bring positive publicity for schools, with recognition from the local to national and international organizations, as well as potential grant funding. They provide students with tangible examples of applied-science, future technologies and career opportunities.
Sincerely,
Alison Ostertag
Masters of Landscape Architecture
TTF Watershed Intern
East Falls Development Corporation
Bartram’s Garden Farm
The following is a compilation of my written comments about the rain garden, submitted on several occasions and in more than one venue. There is accordingly some repetition and overlap, but also different angles of approach, so I have just thrown it all together as my contribution to the conversation…
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Concerns have been raised about the appearance of the rain garden at Riverton School.
I would be very sorry to think there might be any intention to destroy the rain garden barely three years after it was created through the planning, labor, and donations of dozens of residents. I prefer to regard this as an opportunity to address reasonable questions, not only about the appearance of the garden, but about its educational purpose.
Under the sponsorship of the Environmental Commission and the leadership of Mark Jendrzejewski, five landscaping companies, seven civic organizations (including the PTA and the School Board), and over 20 families and individuals contributed professional services, materials, and funding. Students and adults hauled compost and mulch and helped with the planting. Thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours were dedicated to the project. The goal was to demonstrate the ecological and educational value of a rain garden in a suburban setting.
In place of the standard monoculture of evergreen foundation plantings, the rain garden offers a remarkable seventy species and varieties of native trees, flowering shrubs, perennials, grasses, and groundcovers. Runoff that used to flow into the municipal drains, where it contributed to pollution and erosion of the waterways, now waters a natural garden and returns to the earth. I have seen butterflies, bees, and a variety of other insects, including monarch caterpillars, as well as hummingbirds, taking advantage of the habitat. The educational potential of a project that uses native species to demonstrate principles of sustainable landscaping and responsible watershed management is obvious. The garden is also an example to anyone in the community who may want to landscape with native plants, or to students who might be encouraged to develop an interest in ecology. The moral impact of actually having come together as a community to achieve a concrete environmental goal would seem to be an equally important lesson for students.
It has been objected that the rain garden is unattractive. I do not see how this can be said about the section along Howard Street, which has filled in with a beautiful variety of seasonal bloom and foliage. Have you seen the purple aster, scarlet cardinal flower, pink wood oats, the magnolia, and the rest of the eighteen or more types in this area alone?
That said, the Howard Street side is the most fully developed section of the garden, with the most aesthetically pleasing array of leaf and flower. The longer stretches are less immediately attractive, although still ecologically rich. The Environmental Commission has for several months been discussing enhancing the visual appeal by adding more flowering plants and attractive shrubs, as well as more actively maintaining what is there. This needs to be done for its own sake, and also because further development of the rain garden is part of the Commission’s attempt to obtain municipal grants under the Sustainable Jersey program. We do need to do more, and that includes working with the school to take advantage of the educational potential of the rain garden. It would be pointless to tear out a project that cost thousands of dollars and much dedicated labor, only to spend more money to replace it with landscaping that has no educational value at all. I don’t think we want to teach children that the natural landscape is ugly because it doesn’t conform to an essentially monocultural standard.
I think we all have to learn at times to see value where it may not be obvious or conventional. Isn’t this precisely what a real education aims to do? The variety of form, color, texture, and species in the rain garden is incomparably more interesting than the evergreen monoculture that it replaced, if we really look at it and come to understand it. Speaking for the Environmental Commission, I think we can do a better job of opening the eyes of the children and others to this interest and beauty, while continuing to improve the aesthetic appeal of the garden.
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The Riverton School rain garden is the only publicly accessible native plant rain garden in our area. It is a demonstration of one community’s commitment to sustainable landscaping and responsible storm water management. The section along Howard Street shows that these concepts can be combined with an attractive diversity of form, bloom, and foliage. The section along Fifth Street needs to be improved. The best solution consistent with the purpose of the rain garden would be to extend the success of the Howard Street part of the garden to Fifth Street by filling in with native plants that address the desire that there should be, for example, more plants, more color, more “verticality”. Educational signage is also needed, and principles of horticultural science should be respected. I urge this course of action on the School Board. To switch to non-native plants is unnecessary and would vitiate the integrity and educational potential of the rain garden. There is no reason why we could not have an attractive garden with native plants, if we have the funding and a consensus on maintenance (which can be minimal for a fully developed garden of native plants). The Environmental Commission hopes to work with others toward this end. Let’s work together to choose plants and a design that will be pleasing to look at without sacrificing the central values of the garden.
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I am writing to ask the School Board not to destroy the rain garden, but to regard it as a work in progress that can be improved while preserving the educational and environmental value that will be lost if the rain garden ceases to be an example of native plants in a sustainable setting.
It has been stated that the rain garden does not fit in with the surrounding properties. That is true; it is not like most suburban landscaping.
At the last meeting, Mr. Sencindiver reminded us that the way we conduct ourselves regarding the school is first about the children. With that in mind, I would suggest that conformity is not the highest standard we can model when it comes to this or many other choices. The same applies to leaf mulch, which for a number of reasons is more desirable than leaf disposal or mulching with other material. I should also hope we would not send the message that nature in its more natural state is ugly. There is beauty in the form, texture, color, and variety of the rain garden at its best, and still more of interest when the eye and mind have learned to see and appreciate it. We teach appreciation of art, music, literature: there is a lot to learn before you can really see all that is there to enrich a life intellectually, aesthetically, and morally. Education is cultivation. The same applies to the rain garden, both for children and adults. It is an educational opportunity, a chance to grow beyond the common and familiar. The milkw**d along Fifth Street is not a conventionally attractive plant, but without milkw**d there would be no monarch butterflies.
To repeat the central point, a desire to improve the appearance of the Fifth Street side of the rain garden should be common ground for everyone, but there is no reason at all that this cannot be done without sacrificing its uniqueness and its reason for existing. From a logical, scientific, educational, and perhaps ethical point of view, this seems to me to be the best we can do. We also need identifying signage as well as a web presence to open the educational value of the garden to everyone. This project originated with the Environmental Commission. The members of the Commission hope to work with others to achieve these very worthwhile goals.
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In case anyone wonders just what is meant by a “sustainable” rain garden…Sustainable landscaping employs native plants because these are the plants adapted to our region, each filling a niche and therefore able as an ecosystem to sustain biological diversity that can be lost if invasive or non-native plants are introduced. The rain garden is a demonstration of that diversity. Sustainable landscaping recycles rainwater that would otherwise go into municipal drains, potentially damaging and polluting waterways. It therefore preserves the health of streams and replenishes the water table while at the same time requiring less maintenance. Native perennials are adapted to local conditions and require little special treatment, and native annuals re-seed, so the integrity of the garden is to a considerable degree self-sustaining. A garden of native plants provides habitat for native birds and insects, so the principle of sustainability extends beyond the boundary of the garden itself. Naturally, our rain garden makes a small contribution to these goals. But it makes a large statement about them.
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I want to address three criticisms of the rain garden in the context of the purpose of education:
The first criticism is that the rain garden does not conform to the appearance of the neighborhood. Can anyone honestly argue that there is any reason, aesthetic or otherwise, to imitate the landscaping that faces Fifth Street? The essence of this argument is that conformity is desirable for its own sake, and that a native plant rain garden does not belong because it is different. This seems the very opposite of what an education should offer children, or anyone. Why not use the rain garden to teach children to see differently, even if in the end they prefer something else? Note that this is not to say that parts of the garden could not be more conventionally attractive. That can be achieved without destroying the rationale for the garden.
The second criticism is that leaves make a garden look unkempt. This is a common prejudice. All over town leaves are blown into the streets to be hauled away at public expense to sites where they become essentially a pollutant, when in many cases mulching and composting are disregarded options. Leaves return nutrients to the soil. Leaves in a garden are only ugly or unkempt if we make no effort to get beyond a customary perspective that is not the best choice environmentally or economically. Should we continue teaching children that leaves are ugly and need to be gotten rid of regardless of the economic and environmental cost? Children may grow up to share this view, but shouldn’t their own school at least give them a chance to absorb an alternative possibility, not only because of its merits, but because simply pausing to consider alternatives to traditional practice and received wisdom is a vital part of education. Let’s compromise on fewer leaves.
The third criticism is that the rain garden is ugly. I believe that many people will think otherwise if they have a chance to understand the reasons and planning behind the garden: actually to see the differences among the plants, to learn their names, to understand something of the organic unity of the garden and its implications for wider issues of ecological responsibility. That said, there is nothing wrong with adding color, texture, variety, height, to areas of the garden that lack immediate visual appeal. There is nothing wrong with conventional taste, so long as it does not drive out all the other possibilities that life and gardens (and education) have to offer.
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One stated objection to the rain garden was that it ‘looks like the swamp”, by which the speaker meant the Pompeston marsh. Riverton’s tidal marsh contains more than 100 identified plant species, many unique to wetlands, many unusual, interesting, or attractive. The rain garden does resemble the marsh in its diversity, and that diversity depends on the presence of native plants.
We can see the alternative where native plants have been crowded out by prolific invasives. Where phragmites has taken over in local marshes, ecosystems that once contained dozens of species now have just one. Along with the plants, the birds, mammals, insects, and stream-dwelling organisms that depend on a complex ecosystem have vanished, replaced by a monoculture that is ecologically dead. The rain garden, with its reliance on native plants, models ecological variety and is alive with its own meaning and beauty, and I do want to repeat that although conventional attractiveness is a good thing, it is not the only value that should be considered, especially in an educational setting. Any attempt to teach principles of ecology in Riverton School should benefit greatly from direct experience of the rain garden, which would be immediately transferable to an appreciation of the marsh and of ecosystems and biodiversity in general.
Of course, we haven’t adequately conveyed all this to students or the general public. In this respect, a push to make the Fifth Street section of the garden more immediately attractive is welcome, as is the opportunity to make good on the educational potential of the garden. Properly done, these are compatible goals and should unite us in common purpose.
Michael Robinson
12/28/2014
There is more to come!
