Queens Botanical Garden
By Karina | September 10, 2007
My mom came for a visit this weekend and asked to go to a botanical garden while she was here. Which one? I asked – New York, Brooklyn, or Queens? She chose Queens because they have a number of sustainable gardens listed. It turns out that they’re not quite up and running yet, but it was a great trip none-the-less.
A number of the planned sustainable gardens are associated with the new visitors center. The building itself will be LEED Platinum rated, which is the highest rating achievable from the U.S. Green Buildings Council. What excites me about the rating is that to do so the building includes a number of green choices – from the more traditional design decisions of sustainable materials, to the more dramatic energy savers such as geothermal heating and cooling. Best of all, the building will be using a number of neat and practical solutions to some common urban problems: constructed wetlands to treat greywater, bioswales and cleansing biotopes to capture, cleanse, and slow rainwater, and a green roof to reduce urban heat island effect and to minimize the amount of runoff when it rains.
These green choices are partly exciting to me not just because I love constructed wetlands very much, but also because they illustrate some of the choices available to homeowners, towns, and developers that are so rarely utilized. For example: we’ve talked about ways to reuse our greywater. Wouldn’t it be great to avoid sending any of that to the sewers? to treat it with our lawns and send it back into the ecosystem or down to the water table? And even better, I love ideas that will minimize the amount of stormwater runoff from entering the sewer system. Many older cities – from New York to Seattle – have combined sewer overflow (CSO) systems that capture both the sewage from homes and the runoff from street drains to treat in the water treatment plants. However, when it rains the slightest amount these systems become overloaded and they discharge the water directly to the receiving water body rather than overwhelm the treatment plant. Famously, in NYC it can take as little as one-twentieth of an inch of rainfall to overload the system. And, yeah: that means that there is raw sewage entering receiving water bodies virtually every time it rains – I wouldn’t be a trained civil engineer if I didn’t point out that “the solution to pollution is dilution” with my tongue in my cheek.
I can’t wait to return to the Queens Botanical Garden when they’re done with construction so I can get a real feel for the systems they’ll be using (and monitoring!) to minimize their impact on the local ecology. Though I did love to see the composting garden. Thumbs up for composting!
Topics: General | 6 Comments »
WOW!!! that is so quick and wonderful of a report on the garden. it would be so nice to see more areas follow suit, especially building wet lands!
So, you didn’t even consider Staten Island Botanical Gardens? I mean, Queens still would have won, but we do have a lovely set of gardens out here.
I am not really familiar with them! but in terms of using public transportation and minimizing the time spent in transit for my mom (who’d just arrived from albany) I confess I didn’t even look them up.
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