Members of the Wicker Park Garden Club and landscaping enthusiasts from around the city gathered Monday at Wicker Park to learn how they can keep rain water in their soil and out of their storm drains.
Landscape architect Gary Lehman of G Studio Design gave a lecture on green landscaping and his work with the Milwaukee Avenue Green Development Corridor project in the park’s fieldhouse.
The Green Development Corridor project is a joint effort between the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to reduce flooding and improve water conservation in the Logan Square neighborhood.
The program involves $200,000 in grant money that the IEPA will use to reimburse homeowners for up to 75 percent of the costs involved in eligible property and landscape improvements. Designers like Lehman work with residents to fill out the applications, which are then reviewed by the MPC and the IEPA.
The program started as a way to address flooding problems along the Milwaukee Avenue corridor in Logan Square, specifically between California and Central Park avenues. The main idea is to reduce the amount of rain water running into the storm drains by implementing landscaping and architectural methods that redirect it away from the drains and back into the ground and water table.
“They went like two blocks back, or something like that, from Milwaukee Avenue and figured those are the residents that could have the greatest impact on any flooding that would go on Milwaukee Avenue,” Lehman said.
Lehman’s lecture included several examples of projects he’s currently working on through the grant program. He focused on showing the audience how he combines aesthetics and the needs of his clients with the IEPA’s guidelines and specifications about the changes required in order to qualify for a grant.
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While homeowners outside of the Milwaukee Corridor project’s boundaries aren’t eligible for IEPA grant money, the lecture was meant to educate interested members of the Wicker Park Garden Club about how they can improve their own water retention.
Some of the ways he suggested people could manage the flow of storm water on their property and keep it out of the drainage system included rooftop gardens, porous paving materials such as gravel and rain barrels to capture water to use for watering plants.
Lehman said the IEPA also recommends the use of native plants in a landscape in order to increase water conservation. However, Lehman said he thinks the guidelines should be broadened to allow for more of what he calls “high-performance plants” that help keep water in the ground and don’t require too much watering or maintenance.
“The EPA specifically said ‘native plants,’ which has specificity for a lot of lists out there,” he said. “And as soon as they say that, it narrows down my ability to create a design when it could be a little bit broader.”
Lehman’s lecture was part of the Wicker Park Garden Club’s ongoing Landscape Design series, which includes a series of lectures as well as a seven-week Saturday workshop series, according to garden club coordinator Doug Wood.
The lecture series is meant to give landscape and gardening enthusiasts from around the city ideas that they could implement in their own work, and the workshops are intended to teach them the practical skills to put those ideas to work at home. Lehman will also be involved in instructing the Jan. 12 workshop.
Despite the fact that the grant funds are only available to residents in a very specific part of the city, Wood said he wanted to bring Lehman in to give a lecture about it to get people thinking about the same kind of green initiatives in their own neighborhoods. He said he hopes that enough attention or public interest can be generated to get another grant program started in Wicker Park or other areas of the city.
“What you do is you get somebody excited,” Wood said. “And then they talk to the alderman and they talk to the SSA and they talk to historic groups, and you write a proposal for these groups to make your area that way. That’s the goal.”
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