urban greenvasion : gutter ruffs

This week featured some very heavy rain, and when that happens, gutters overflow. Water pours down the outside of downpipes, slooshes over the edge of gutters, plashes down on you at random from on high. The thing about England is that no weather lasts for very long, so optimising for heavy rainfall as some areas do (huge drains, rain chains, etc.) isn't really pointful, and though the last few years have pushed that envelope from time to time, they have also featured long dry spells.

During those dry spells, there are sometimes smears of green around gutters:

Which brings me back to a moral problem I have with gutters. They treat water as a problem, rather than an asset. It must be whisked away, tidy and quick, dumped into the surface water drainage ASAP and whisked away from the urban areas and dumped on the outskirts of town, via creeks, soakaways, rivers and drains.

This act of - frankly - water theft steals from urban areas that desperately need cooling, sluicing,  irrigation and cleaning, who then have to rebuy water from the mains to do all of these jobs. We aren't talking about urban rainwater storage tanks here (though they are a good idea) but we are talking about using some of that gutter overflow for vegetation, to reduce run-off and enable urban cooling. 

You get the idea. This one has been executed in lead to match the flashing on the roof, and has accepted the fact of that leaky sloping pipe and used to grow low maintenance vegetation irrigated by the water from the roof. It's all probably a bit leady, so something that can strip that out (willow, fescue, pennycress) is probably a good choice. Here's a problematic downpipe:

What a lot of rust is on that downpipe! Water must stripe down the outside in heavy rain. So, let's formalise that, with a clamp-around vertical planting container. If there's a flat roof it's draining, you could also slow and cool things down before it even hits the drain with a no-maintenance brown roof covered with gravel and plants that happily desiccate and reinflate when the water returns. 

Feels a little bit too challenging? Well, here's a simpler proposition:

Lets just extend out that top bucket a little, add lightweight granules and planting medium, and there we are, a very simple green bucket drain.

And because I don't want regular houses to be missed out (these are all quite municipal examples), let's have a look at a basic urban house with soffits and curved pen gutters. My house looks like this, except that I don't have any soffits because I prefer having housemartins (two broods this year! my housemartins are heroes!)

Aside from what will be an ivy problem the moment it hits the eaves (soffits don't stop ivy), this is not a very green looking house. So, let's fix that with am overflow soffit, that accommodates a shallow planting trough which picks up overflow from a notched gutter:

It has a nice air, somewhere between Ballardian decay and aspirational Wisteria, and because everything is resin, it's all pretty light and hard-wearing. So, gutter ruffs, what do we need to get from here to there?

• Shift of attitude toward water in the urban environment from vector of decay to irrigation and cooling prospect.
• Some new products coming onto the market.
• Super-light planting mediums.
• Plant testing to find ones which tolerate this kind of envioronment well and without causing structural damage.
• Shifting attitudes towards having green stuff sprouting from your gutters from indicator of urban decay to aspirational/decorational
• Availability of at-height gardening (maybe from roofing firms).

I'm not sure it'll stop the problem of occasionally water jetting down from on high. Greenery being what it is, it may even expand that algal and mossy slick of green. But it will create an interesting urban environment, it will cool buildings, and it will, simply, be very cool.