How Suds can stop the floods...or can it?

This article in the Telegraph alludes to SUDS being a flood saviour but can the diversion of local surface water run-off really solve the problem?

Attention is increasingly returning to measures that mimic the natural processes: reducing the amount of water reaching the man-made systems. Boringly entitled “sustainable drainage systems” (but more attractively acronymed as Suds) slow the flow, store it and encourage it to seep into the ground. Suds include “green” roofs planted with vegetation, permeable paving allowing water through to the soil below, grassland depressions called swales that carry water off into ponds, and even garden water butts.
Typically they cost less than half as much as traditional drainage systems and far less than the flood defences erected to safeguard communities, essential though both continue to be. And they can improve areas and property values by encouraging wildlife and adorning landscapes.

Read full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10549244/How-Suds-can-stop-the-floods.html

The virtues of soft landscaping...

The recent storm damage has only highlighted the need for government, planners, building developers, garden designers and the amateur gardener to consider the environment. Let’s hope it acts as a wake-up call, because for too long I believe we have been sleep-walking into a disaster with increasingly poor use of the 12% of the built landscape that was once made up from our gardens.

When we hear the word ‘landscaping’ we usually associate ‘hard’ with it. Patios, paved paths, steps, flat gravel beds, decking, solid fences, hard, flat angular terraces, giant pots and boxes are typical. Much contemporary commissioned work reflects this style, often designed with flair and installed to a high technical standard. However, some recent Chelsea winners have taken a greener, more organic approach. This is something I applaud, because I think we are in danger of overlooking the virtues of ‘soft’ landscaping. ‘We’, that is as designers, and ‘we’, as the buying public, who are influenced by the kind of examples highlighted in our advertising.
So what is ‘soft’ landscaping? By one definition it is just the planting. The assumption that landscaping is all done and dusted with the ‘hard’ components is surely too narrow. ‘Soft’ landscaping is a range of alternatives to the features listed at the start that are porous and often vegetative in nature. ‘Soft’ landscaping might also be described as ‘green’ landscaping, partly because of the higher ratio of ground cover vegetation. It is closer to nature and better for the eco-system. In practice, the ‘soft’ usually go best with some essential ‘hard’ elements; a lawn without a firm retainer is frequently a sorry affair.

What precisely are these viable ‘soft’ alternatives? Why should we prefer them? Why, if they are so good, are they less favoured today than hitherto?
Most ‘soft’ features have been around for centuries. For patios and flat gravel beds substitute lawns and soil beds. For solid fences substitute hedges (formal and informal), earth banks, open trellis fencing or some combination of all three. For steps substitute banks, inclines and rockeries. There are, in addition, some excellent innovations, though it could be argued that all have precedents. ‘Platform’ and ‘pavement’ gardens can, for example, soften excessive areas of paving or decking. A ‘green wall’ can enliven a dull, vertical plane of fence panel. The wildflower meadow or the herb lawn are interesting variants on the traditional lawn.

Decisions on design turn around the following criteria: aesthetics, utility, short and long-term maintenance requirements, ecology, cost and availability. ‘Soft’ solutions score highly on all of these, though it helps to be a keen gardener and to have some patience. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ‘ holds true for gardens no less than it does for people, but, for moist of us, abundant foliage, flowers and tree canopy structures beats an expanse of gravel , particularly over the winter months when AY R interest has been taken into account. Practical issues are vital and always need to be considered in context. In a damp, loose, steep environment steps and hard terracing may well be the only sensible, safe solution. However, how often do we see torn-down fence panels or an ‘economy’ wall lower than it needs to be when a tough informal hedge on a bank would have been better? How often do we find a paved path far wider than it needs when some of the space could have been used for a flower bed? All these ‘soft’ alternatives are cheaper, assuming that no false economies are taken such as shallow walls or inadequate foundations. Small trees and shrubs are currently very cheap compared to slabs, walls and solid fencing. Grass is cheaper than gravel so long as the lawn is seeded rather than laid. Rocks for rockeries are expensive but are often available from simultaneous excavations for beds and ponds in the same plot, creating a hidden base. This isn’t shoddy practice, it’s recycling, the right ecological choice. It also cuts down costs involved in extraction and transport; if costs are reduced the customer is happier and the qualified designer can compete more readily against the cut-price, low quality provider who may lack knowledge of horticulture. Over the longer-term the ‘soft’ features require regular maintenance, but for the maintenance side of our industry as well as for the health of the able-bodied amateur gardener that is only to be welcomed. Over a ten year period I estimate a ‘soft’ landscaped garden will be 25% more economical than the ‘hard’ version for the able-bodied householder doing their own maintenance and only 10% more expensive for the infirm householder requiring bought-in maintenance over the growing season.

If the ‘soft’ alternative to hard landscaping is so good, why does the latter increasingly dominate? Householders today are more inclined to see their garden as an extension of the house. A typical suburban house will have small gardens at the front and back. At the back the garden is an outdoor dining room, a machine-cut floor leading through French windows onto decking, gravel, pots and patio for the summer barbecue. Minimalist interior decoration, often in fashionable creams and light ochres, merges seamlessly into a minimalist exterior design with similar hues. At the front, extreme functionality is the order of the day with space for family cars over hard, impermeable surfaces squeezing out lawns, beds and trees. Both ‘garden rooms’ require little maintenance , assuming they are well made. This well observed social phenomenon has arisen due to increasing car ownership and ever smaller gardens in new build development. It has been encouraged by certain garden makeover programmes, where the materials budget and free labour are both in abundant supply. The money issue was not such a problem for captivated householders until the bubble burst on the boom in 2007. Allied to this is the mistaken belief that ‘softer’ features like hedges and lawns don’t require an expert, so might, if desired, be added at some later stage. In fact, the ‘hard’ features are mostly difficult and expensive to remove and replace. Multi-coloured gravels, stones and pots gleam in summer light and this is when most designs are commissioned. Another bonus is that the results are instant. In spite of living in a ‘post-industrial’ world we are still immersed in the ‘machine age’, perhaps sub-consciously, where the aesthetic is driven by the hard, clear, perfectly level and angular lines of our electronic devices. It is to computers too that we, as designers, increasingly look to create visualisations of our designs; however flexible, these necessarily tend towards combinations of modified rectangles and circles.

Does it matter that ‘hard’ landscaping rules the roost in any larger sense than that it offends some sensibilities? Yes it does, because there are greater issues at stake. Some of the key issues are environmental. Polluted air, flooding water and structurally damaging winds are three of the banes of modern living under an over-heated atmosphere. The Victorian urban planner knew that Aucuba japonica and Platanus x Hispanica take up air pollutants, hence their mass planting in suburbia. We must return to their good practice, using these or other more fashionable and smaller species. The increasing incidence of flooding has been exacerbated by run-off from hard-surfaced ‘gardens’. One response was the Flood Act of 2010, obliging builders to landscape developments so that water from roofs and driveways seeps into open ground, rather than overloading the sewers. Applied to a whole estate, the ‘soft’ landscaping solution typically consists of the water running down through a bed of rocks and into a large pond with reeds, sedges and shrubs. This vegetation helps by taking up some of the water, increasing biodiversity and helpfully breaking down pollutants as they grow. Regrettably, the act does not require builders to also install these features at the level of the individual garden. However, there is no good reason why aspects of these features can’t be used in
each garden. Sand below soil for better drainage and ‘swales’, grassy depressions carrying off water to ponds, should become regular features in our designs. Unfortunately too, the act doesn’t apply to the 99% of British housing stock that is not new-build, so we should be looking to adjust the more obvious mistakes in excessively ‘hard’ designs in existing developments. Excessively wide hard-paved paths should be narrowed and flower beds created in the resulting gaps. The third modern problem of a warming atmosphere is destructively strong wind. Here too ‘soft’ landscaping has a better answer than the solid barrier that sends high currents onwards to do further damage, whilst obscuring garden landscapes that should at least be semi-visible so that all can enjoy them. Each tree, each shrub, each bank and hollow assists in breaking down the force of a 70 mph gust.
Both aesthetically and environmentally the ‘soft’ landscape opens up more possibilities. There is no reason why every surface should be level. Not every depression need be a pond; consider the grotto or the sunken fernery, two more Victorian favourites. So much can be recycled and re-positioned, dead or older trees finding any number of re-cycled uses. I believe that the popularity of ‘hard’ designs threatens gardening itself in the longer term. If gardening with mass planting is seen as a chore and gravel, patio and pots viewed as an easy alternative, then amateur gardening skills will no longer be needed and will eventually disappear, just as many of today’s under forties can no longer prepare a meal from first ingredients or darn a sock. Today’s garden repertoire is becoming akin to a fast food menu, the choice drastically reduced and simplified, with the results safe but utterly predictable.

So what can be done to urge a nation of exterior house-space consumers back towards ‘soft’ landscapes and real gardening? The maxim ‘the customer is king’ cannot be ignored in the tight , cut-throat garden design market. Any designer who ignores it will surely come a-cropper. However, I believe we can nudge customers in the ‘soft’ direction. TV’s Great British Garden Revival is a step in the right direction, though like so many TV shows, it suggests that some technically difficult landscape features are achievable by the amateur. Garden designers should employ the logic of the 2010 Flood Act to urge similar ‘eco’ solutions at the garden scale. Governments, national and local , though strapped for cash, need to ameliorate the causes of urban flooding that will otherwise cost far more in the long-term, following the example of Malmo in Sweden in planning for organic soak away. Government should even consider subsidising the re-greening of the blighted concrete jungle of modern suburbia. Our garden design philosophy is also ill-matched to present and future needs. It has been nurtured in more affluent times and has always tended to assume that our customers are only to be found amongst the well-heeled. We should be less precious than those otherwise excellent garden writers of the late twentieth century who told us it was bad practice to put builders’ waste and ugly rocks at the foot of a rockery. Most of all, let’s publicise the beauty inherent in good planting in a ‘softly’ modelled landscape.

Replies

Jackson's Landscape Design January 8, 2014 at 3:49pm

Agree

And upgrade the Victorian main storm / foul systems..... how many more new build properties can Cameron's shower squeeze into the heavily overload main drains??

In 2008 landscapers, driveway installers were blamed for the introduction of a new legislation of SUDS.... the egg is now on the faces of Westminster. Yet another flaw from our "leaders".
Trevor JH Knight January 8, 2014 at 7:03pm

The question asked is if can SUDS stop the floods?

The answer is it certainly wont make the floods any worse as it can only benefit the risk of flooding, that is of course if carried out and installed properly.

The problem lies when the legislation is paid tacit lip service and then token gesture systems are installed. These systems wont do Jack Squat Diddely to help flooding but cover the installers legal obligation.

The quality installers do it properly and gain no benefit apart from being able to sleep at night whilst watching the scammers getting away with it day in day out.

There are some superb products and systems out there which undoubtedly work, that is if there is the public appetite to do it and the legal back up to enforce it. In my view that is not in place and should be.

Westminster should stop being a legislator if they cant enforce what they legislate.
Landscape Juice January 10, 2014 at 10:10am

Flood prevention plans back on the agenda
http://www.landscapejuicenetwork.com/profiles/blogs/flood-preventio...
Landscape Juice January 10, 2014 at 10:10am

Storms' link to climate change uncertain - Met Office
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25675937
Svend Rumbold January 11, 2014 at 1:43pm

I think you have to be a bit realistic. SUDS can't do anything to reduce groundwater flooding, where the water table rises to the surface. It can help with surface water flooding, especially in urban areas, where drainage systems struggle to cope with rainwater from ever-increasing areas of roofs and paved surfaces.

But SUDS won't do anything to help existing problems, they will merely make future problems "less bad".

And regulations on their own won't address the many soakaways still being installed in impermeable clay, or even - dare I say - those instances where the installer has simply put a grating across the end of the drive to give the illusion of a SUDS-compliant installation, without actually connecting it to anything at all. (I guess this is what Trevor is alluding to?) These sorts of practices usually happen where drainage to sewer would be the best solution but there hasn't been investment in the necessary infrastructure: antiquated Victorian sewers are certainly a part of the problem, but the complete absence of storm sewers in some developments is a bigger issue.
Benjamin O'Neill January 11, 2014 at 6:25pm

Green roofs have been around for years and have been proven to reduce flooding issues, yet its only now that the government is starting to take action.
Quentin Eliot Deakin January 12, 2014 at 4:38pm

The virtues of soft landscaping...

The recent storm damage has only highlighted the need for government, planners, building developers, garden designers and the amateur gardener to consider the environment. Let’s hope it acts as a wake-up call, because for too long I believe we have been sleep-walking into a disaster with increasingly poor use of the 12% of the built landscape that was once made up from our gardens.

When we hear the word ‘landscaping’ we usually associate ‘hard’ with it. Patios, paved paths, steps, flat gravel beds, decking, solid fences, hard, flat angular terraces, giant pots and boxes are typical. Much contemporary commissioned work reflects this style, often designed with flair and installed to a high technical standard. However, some recent Chelsea winners have taken a greener, more organic approach. This is something I applaud, because I think we are in danger of overlooking the virtues of ‘soft’ landscaping. ‘We’, that is as designers, and ‘we’, as the buying public, who are influenced by the kind of examples highlighted in our advertising.
So what is ‘soft’ landscaping? By one definition it is just the planting. The assumption that landscaping is all done and dusted with the ‘hard’ components is surely too narrow. ‘Soft’ landscaping is a range of alternatives to the features listed at the start that are porous and often vegetative in nature. ‘Soft’ landscaping might also be described as ‘green’ landscaping, partly because of the higher ratio of ground cover vegetation. It is closer to nature and better for the eco-system. In practice, the ‘soft’ usually go best with some essential ‘hard’ elements; a lawn without a firm retainer is frequently a sorry affair.

What precisely are these viable ‘soft’ alternatives? Why should we prefer them? Why, if they are so good, are they less favoured today than hitherto?
Most ‘soft’ features have been around for centuries. For patios and flat gravel beds substitute lawns and soil beds. For solid fences substitute hedges (formal and informal), earth banks, open trellis fencing or some combination of all three. For steps substitute banks, inclines and rockeries. There are, in addition, some excellent innovations, though it could be argued that all have precedents. ‘Platform’ and ‘pavement’ gardens can, for example, soften excessive areas of paving or decking. A ‘green wall’ can enliven a dull, vertical plane of fence panel. The wildflower meadow or the herb lawn are interesting variants on the traditional lawn.

Decisions on design turn around the following criteria: aesthetics, utility, short and long-term maintenance requirements, ecology, cost and availability. ‘Soft’ solutions score highly on all of these, though it helps to be a keen gardener and to have some patience. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ‘ holds true for gardens no less than it does for people, but, for moist of us, abundant foliage, flowers and tree canopy structures beats an expanse of gravel , particularly over the winter months when AY R interest has been taken into account. Practical issues are vital and always need to be considered in context. In a damp, loose, steep environment steps and hard terracing may well be the only sensible, safe solution. However, how often do we see torn-down fence panels or an ‘economy’ wall lower than it needs to be when a tough informal hedge on a bank would have been better? How often do we find a paved path far wider than it needs when some of the space could have been used for a flower bed? All these ‘soft’ alternatives are cheaper, assuming that no false economies are taken such as shallow walls or inadequate foundations. Small trees and shrubs are currently very cheap compared to slabs, walls and solid fencing. Grass is cheaper than gravel so long as the lawn is seeded rather than laid. Rocks for rockeries are expensive but are often available from simultaneous excavations for beds and ponds in the same plot, creating a hidden base. This isn’t shoddy practice, it’s recycling, the right ecological choice. It also cuts down costs involved in extraction and transport; if costs are reduced the customer is happier and the qualified designer can compete more readily against the cut-price, low quality provider who may lack knowledge of horticulture. Over the longer-term the ‘soft’ features require regular maintenance, but for the maintenance side of our industry as well as for the health of the able-bodied amateur gardener that is only to be welcomed. Over a ten year period I estimate a ‘soft’ landscaped garden will be 25% more economical than the ‘hard’ version for the able-bodied householder doing their own maintenance and only 10% more expensive for the infirm householder requiring bought-in maintenance over the growing season.

If the ‘soft’ alternative to hard landscaping is so good, why does the latter increasingly dominate? Householders today are more inclined to see their garden as an extension of the house. A typical suburban house will have small gardens at the front and back. At the back the garden is an outdoor dining room, a machine-cut floor leading through French windows onto decking, gravel, pots and patio for the summer barbecue. Minimalist interior decoration, often in fashionable creams and light ochres, merges seamlessly into a minimalist exterior design with similar hues. At the front, extreme functionality is the order of the day with space for family cars over hard, impermeable surfaces squeezing out lawns, beds and trees. Both ‘garden rooms’ require little maintenance , assuming they are well made. This well observed social phenomenon has arisen due to increasing car ownership and ever smaller gardens in new build development. It has been encouraged by certain garden makeover programmes, where the materials budget and free labour are both in abundant supply. The money issue was not such a problem for captivated householders until the bubble burst on the boom in 2007. Allied to this is the mistaken belief that ‘softer’ features like hedges and lawns don’t require an expert, so might, if desired, be added at some later stage. In fact, the ‘hard’ features are mostly difficult and expensive to remove and replace. Multi-coloured gravels, stones and pots gleam in summer light and this is when most designs are commissioned. Another bonus is that the results are instant. In spite of living in a ‘post-industrial’ world we are still immersed in the ‘machine age’, perhaps sub-consciously, where the aesthetic is driven by the hard, clear, perfectly level and angular lines of our electronic devices. It is to computers too that we, as designers, increasingly look to create visualisations of our designs; however flexible, these necessarily tend towards combinations of modified rectangles and circles.

Does it matter that ‘hard’ landscaping rules the roost in any larger sense than that it offends some sensibilities? Yes it does, because there are greater issues at stake. Some of the key issues are environmental. Polluted air, flooding water and structurally damaging winds are three of the banes of modern living under an over-heated atmosphere. The Victorian urban planner knew that Aucuba japonica and Platanus x Hispanica take up air pollutants, hence their mass planting in suburbia. We must return to their good practice, using these or other more fashionable and smaller species. The increasing incidence of flooding has been exacerbated by run-off from hard-surfaced ‘gardens’. One response was the Flood Act of 2010, obliging builders to landscape developments so that water from roofs and driveways seeps into open ground, rather than overloading the sewers. Applied to a whole estate, the ‘soft’ landscaping solution typically consists of the water running down through a bed of rocks and into a large pond with reeds, sedges and shrubs. This vegetation helps by taking up some of the water, increasing biodiversity and helpfully breaking down pollutants as they grow. Regrettably, the act does not require builders to also install these features at the level of the individual garden. However, there is no good reason why aspects of these features can’t be used in
each garden. Sand below soil for better drainage and ‘swales’, grassy depressions carrying off water to ponds, should become regular features in our designs. Unfortunately too, the act doesn’t apply to the 99% of British housing stock that is not new-build, so we should be looking to adjust the more obvious mistakes in excessively ‘hard’ designs in existing developments. Excessively wide hard-paved paths should be narrowed and flower beds created in the resulting gaps. The third modern problem of a warming atmosphere is destructively strong wind. Here too ‘soft’ landscaping has a better answer than the solid barrier that sends high currents onwards to do further damage, whilst obscuring garden landscapes that should at least be semi-visible so that all can enjoy them. Each tree, each shrub, each bank and hollow assists in breaking down the force of a 70 mph gust.
Both aesthetically and environmentally the ‘soft’ landscape opens up more possibilities. There is no reason why every surface should be level. Not every depression need be a pond; consider the grotto or the sunken fernery, two more Victorian favourites. So much can be recycled and re-positioned, dead or older trees finding any number of re-cycled uses. I believe that the popularity of ‘hard’ designs threatens gardening itself in the longer term. If gardening with mass planting is seen as a chore and gravel, patio and pots viewed as an easy alternative, then amateur gardening skills will no longer be needed and will eventually disappear, just as many of today’s under forties can no longer prepare a meal from first ingredients or darn a sock. Today’s garden repertoire is becoming akin to a fast food menu, the choice drastically reduced and simplified, with the results safe but utterly predictable.

So what can be done to urge a nation of exterior house-space consumers back towards ‘soft’ landscapes and real gardening? The maxim ‘the customer is king’ cannot be ignored in the tight , cut-throat garden design market. Any designer who ignores it will surely come a-cropper. However, I believe we can nudge customers in the ‘soft’ direction. TV’s Great British Garden Revival is a step in the right direction, though like so many TV shows, it suggests that some technically difficult landscape features are achievable by the amateur. Garden designers should employ the logic of the 2010 Flood Act to urge similar ‘eco’ solutions at the garden scale. Governments, national and local , though strapped for cash, need to ameliorate the causes of urban flooding that will otherwise cost far more in the long-term, following the example of Malmo in Sweden in planning for organic soak away. Government should even consider subsidising the re-greening of the blighted concrete jungle of modern suburbia. Our garden design philosophy is also ill-matched to present and future needs. It has been nurtured in more affluent times and has always tended to assume that our customers are only to be found amongst the well-heeled. We should be less precious than those otherwise excellent garden writers of the late twentieth century who told us it was bad practice to put builders’ waste and ugly rocks at the foot of a rockery. Most of all, let’s publicise the beauty inherent in good planting in a ‘softly’ modelled landscape.
Geoff Norfolk January 12, 2014 at 5:37pm

Thats an impressive post Quentin....... it must have taken ages.
PRO

Phil Voice February 21, 2014 at 11:07am

What about groundwater and its affect on SuDS?

Down in Hampshire, the village of Hambledon (part of my old trading area) is in the Meon Valley and built on chalk.

Hambledon is experiencing flooding at the moment but the problem for the village isn't the overflowing of rivers. Water is being pushed up from the chalk rock below because the rock capacity is full and the water has nowhere to drain to.