planting for the wet and the dry

Once again, I feel like the spring is too dry, too wet, too dry again. 

And so I am reading about multiyear megadroughts followed by record breaking rainfall (and occasionally watching friends dealing with the consequences) and the idea that a city might slow the flow rather than manage water through waterflow acceleration through urban areas via fast-drain gutters.

The duality of water, both threat to banish and resource to retain haunts my soggy city. As more gardens are paved over in the never-ending need for parkingspace, workingspace, livingspace, cookingspace, it gets hotter, more humid and drier at the same time. I plant for the dry, and my plants die in seasonal moulds and drenches. I plant for the wet, the droughts swiftly dispose. I'm left with the urban heavyweights, which increasingly means problematic, complicated, ivy firecely competitive and inclined to pry the hard standing apart. Ivy comes in, and everything else moves out.

Lush water-capturing ribbon parks with pebble rivers and tough, reliable planting are a local feature. But the "drywells" described in the linked article (holes taking the water from the stormdrains) are a commonplace concept. Soakaways, like the one outside my house.

But language does matter, and does make things more palatable; would you rather be stuck in a ditch, or admiring the irises in your bioswale?

(Later on in the article is the much-suggested idea of making people pay an impermeable land tax, where each square foot of impermeable pave-over is charged.)

But the item that really caught my eye was "green alleys". Which brings me back to ivy, and the dark threat of an ivy-overhung urban cut-through, where kids see witches and adults see muggers in the dull green shadows, and I was wondering; have people tested to see which kinds of vegetation make an alleyway feel safer, less risky?

Which leads me to Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime? (paywalled so here's a summary on a blog) although I'll save you the read, and share the findings that, well, it can, if it's cared for and people like it. 

I'll end on a happy note with some working-out-well community alleyway transformations. They feel like a nice idea, don't they? But we all know spaces where the results of such schemes have been less aesthetic, especially five years or so in, and the odd line here and there about how much effort was involved hint at how this won't work for all.

But where it's working, what a beautiful sight!