DryStoneGarden

Sometimes I get reminded that Richmond is a refinery town.

The biggest corporate property owner, employer, tax payer, and polluter in the city is Chevron. Their relationship with the city is often adversarial, with a business tax measure (T) aimed directly at them 2 years ago, an audit finding $28 million in underpaid taxes last year, and more lawsuits and threatened lawsuits and petitions than I can keep straight. Anita and I get opinion-polled about the company on a monthly basis, and recently the company invited us to a tour of their refinery. It’s the first time in anyone’s memory that they’ve opened their doors to the public, so getting the invitation felt a little like getting a golden ticket. I was expecting to see oompah loompahs or something.

The tour was, of course, tightly controlled. We were on a bus the entire time, and there were no cameras, cell phones, or bags allowed. I was hoping they would show us their restoration project in Wildcat Creek Marsh on the north end of their property, but they kept the tour within the main facilities. I’m not sure what I learned, maybe that they have a lot of pipes (5,000 miles on 2,900 acres) or how they sell the various bi-products of the refining process, including CO2 to carbonated beverage companies. After the tour, they gave us gift bags with aluminum water bottles (made in China), reuseable shopping bags, and some unconvincing literature touting all of the things Chevron does for the community and the environment. The Chevron logo on the shopping bags should cause much envy at the organic market.

Rain Garden Perspective Drawing by Gates and Associates

As part of the stimulus program and various water quality initiatives, El Cerrito got funding to add some rain gardens along San Pablo Avenue, the main commercial street in my neighborhood. A huge percentage of the area is covered with concrete, so when it rains the water has nowhere to go and the streets can look like this photo I took in May; sometimes I feel like I should get out a kayak. To help mediate that, the city redid two sections of sidewalkswith plantings set below the grade of the street. Instead of draining straight to the bay, stormwater will now flow from the streets and sidewalks into planting areas where sediment will drop out of the water and pollutants and trash will be filtered by the plants. There are 600 total linear feet of basins in the two separate areas, calculated to treat 1.23 acres of paved surface; the San Francsico Estuary Institute is going to monitor water quality to see how big of an effect the gardens have. There’s a podcast about the project here. It’s a nice use of plants to address an infrastructure issue.

San Pablo And Eureka Ave

The plantings are all natives. Juncus, leymus, and a grass that looks like a melica are the main species, peppered with some yarrows, two monkey flowers, two California fuchsias, two Ribes speciosa, several Verbena lilacina, two wild roses, a redtiwg dogwood, and a Doug Iris. There are one or two blooming plants in each planter right now, not a big impact, but just enough to focus the eye as you walk past each one.

Monkey Flower and Leymus

The El Cerrito Patch says the cost of the project was $350,000 for the two sections of rain gardens.

San Pablo and Eureka

Island Pink Yarrow, Achillea millefolium rosea

There’s a meme about public plantings, Out on the Streets, hosted by Veg Plotting. Click through to see other posts about public plantings. I have a few more photos of the planters below the fold. (more…)

$195,140 worth of birches?

We once had to do a lot of talking to convince a client that he didn’t want to chop down a healthy live oak that was just beginning to develop the kind of dramatic architecture that can’t be purchased with anything other than time. Since then, I’ve been wanting a dollar value for what a tree can add to a property, a number that’s easily cited and perhaps easily dismissed, but undeniably monetary and specific. A number like $8,870, the number that a recent study came up with after looking at how the presence or absence of street trees affected the sale prices for homes sold in east Portland during 2006-7. (The houses with trees also sold an average of 1.7 days quicker.) It’s obviously one of those statistics which can’t be applied too literally, but the researchers seem to have made an effort to account for some of the other variables that might surround the real estate sales. And though it is somewhat mercenary and doesn’t account for the many environmental and aesthetic benefits of trees and there probably isn’t a direct causal relationship, it might help people appreciate their trees more. What homeowner could hear that stat and not go right out to get a street tree? Personally, I’m sure I’ll cite the number at some point in the future, possibly to our landlord who knows that Anita and I are responsible for adding six street trees to our block. Shouldn’t that get us $53,220 credit towards our rent?

In a somewhat related note, I’ve always liked this planting of birches in my neighborhood and this post seems like the most reasonable time to mention it. The planting has an impressive total of 22 birches, which is 19 more than anyone else ever has. I’m pretty sure the birches count as ‘good overall tree cover,’ rather than as individual $8,870 trees, but there’s no question they make the house more valuable and desirable. The trees do the sun-in-winter, shade-in-summer thing for the house, and the planting always looks remarkably good, even when the understory needs maintenance. Designers talk about being bold or committed; 22 birches shows a serious level of commitment. Props to whoever planted them.

And in an unrelated note, the New York Times did a feature on Humphrey Slocombe, the ice cream store I mentioned a couple of posts back. The article’s a little heavy on the ‘wacky San Francisco’ angle, but then the ice cream parlor is actually pretty wacky and it’s hard to imagine it existing somewhere other than San Francisco. As an explanation for the unusual flavors, the proprietor says, “I just got to the point that I felt I’d have to kill myself if I ever made another crème brûlée or warm chocolate cake again.” Haven’t we all.

So this video doesn’t have much garden or stone content (I can’t picture the Jesus and Mary Chain pruning a shrubbery), but my motto this spring is that ‘I’m Happy When It Rains.’ I don’t know any of the lyrics other than the title and I’m sure the singer is really singing about a girl instead of precipitation, but I think of this song every time it rains. Partly because I can’t work when it rains (sort of a good thing, sort of a bad thing), but also of course because rain is good for the plants. Even when it messes with my schedule, it gives me a chance to catch up on office work, billing, banking, blogging, and all of the other things I can’t do while I’m on site in someone’s yard. Tuesday seemed like an unusually heavy rain for this late in the month, .32 inches in one day, and today has been even heavier. Historically, Richmond averages .54 inches in May; we’ve had .63 so far, which isn’t so high, but today will take us well past 150% of normal. I know someone whose birthday was on Tuesday, and she says it had never rained on her birthday in fifty years of living in California.

The Streets of Richmond on May 27?!!

Something a little more positive about my neighborhood, a video taken at Bridges (technically across the border in El Cerrito, rather than Richmond Annex), the newish climbing gym near our house. Instead of roped climbing, the climbing walls are for bouldering and give a longer and more-highball climb than the bouldering walls at other gyms; you have to top out on all the climbs instead of just jumping down.

Along with climbing, the focus of the gym is slacklining, which is basically tight rope walking except that it’s done on climbing webbing which flexes and is more dynamic than a tight rope, dynamic enough, evidently, to use as a trampoline. Personally, I’m terrible at it; Anita’s pretty good, though not yet at the backflip stage. Slacklining used to just be something that climbers did on their rest days, but some of the people at Bridges are more interested in it than climbing, and I think now there are starting to be competitions for it.

A recent documentary about Dean Potter, the most famous slackliner, has a lot of footage and talks a bit about the origins of slacklining. Shorter scenes of Potter slacklining can be seen with soothing musical accompaniment or with an Aussie narrator and some entertaining quotes.

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Andy Lewis, the slackliner in the video showed up in Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show.

…if we never got our computer stolen. Or something like that. It seems to be one of the realities of our neighborhood. Several of our neighbors were robbed a couple of years ago, another one last year, and I guess now it was our turn. While we were in Baja last month someone carried off the copper trellis from our front yard, and now this past week the same person or someone else has taken our computer. The joys of urban living.

It could have been worse I guess. The copper trellis was a leftover item that got installed temporarily in our garden, and we always knew it was something of a risk. I don’t even have any photos of it, actually, because I was never enthusiastic about how it was sited. Losing the computer is a much bigger drag, but we had it synched up with our office computer and backed up online, so we didn’t lose many files or photos. Three cheers for cloud computing.

We didn’t seem to have a theft problem while we were fostering pit bulls, so we’ll probably be getting another dog soon, and definitely before we get another computer. In the meantime, blogging will be less convenient, as I can only do it from our office computer now. If anyone knows of a scary-looking barker in need of a good home, let us know.