Verdant Design

Louisville’s Bike to Work Day is Friday, May 15th. It is an easy way to join in with other cyclists as they commute into downtown or other destinations. City officials would like to measure how many people are commuting by bike that day, so sign up to be counted! If you need bike routes, you can access the City’s bike maps as pdf’s. Louisville bike safety classes can be found at Bicycling for Louisville’s website. And if you think you’ve got a list of excuses, here is a place to find solutions. Here is our list of why we see cycling as important to our practice, our sustainability, and our future.

Celandine Poppy or Wood Poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) is a wonderful woodland plant that doesn’t require any special effort to grow.  In fact it grows in shade to part-sun, reproduces easily, and only gets to about 18″ in height.  On top of that, it is a plant that consistently blooms around Derby.  It is native to the Ohio Valley, so it is perfectly adjusted to our climate and soils.

One of the real benefits of a rain garden is water infiltration. When rain water enters the soil it does a lot of good locally as well as decreasing the amount of runoff (and therefore flooding). So what kind of infiltration can be expected? April 5th’s evening storm was a good example. We had roughly 0.38 inches of rain in about ten minutes according to the nearby MSD rain gauge. Here are a series of photos with the first one taken during the rain storm with water running into the micro-basin, the second just as it was ending with water being retained and the third ten minutes after it ended with the water fully infiltrated into the ground.