Tree planting on Little Creek, Bristol TN

The rain garden at Bristol City Hall (Tennessee) intercepts runoff from the parking lot before it flows into Beaver Creek. Native plants that can tolerate both "wet feet" and dry conditions were planted in the rain garden during September 2014, and with some luck and good weather, they should fill in nicely this spring and summer. This is a great demonstration project to showcase how raingardens can be used to disconnect impervious areas (like parking lots) from streams in an aesthetically pleasing way!

I've been waiting for a few months to take this photo with my car in the background, and today was the day! My friend and colleague, Gary Barrigar (Boone Watershed Partnership past president and our project manager), designed the sign - not sure if he had my car in mind, but it makes for a great photo!!

Looking left from the upper photo, we walk a few hundred feet across the parking lot to Little Creek (which meets up with Beaver Creek about a hundred yards downstream from where this photo was taken). Today a group of volunteers spent about three hours planting trees along the eroding banks of Little Creek. This was a fill-in effort, as we planted trees last spring, and we were filling in the areas where the trees did not survive the summer heat/floods/droughts - you name it. This is a difficult site to get trees to take hold, but due to space constraints, reshaping of the streambank is not possible. Today we also installed native willow live stakes in the lower 3 feet of the bank, which will be more secure and fill in nicely over the next year or two. Livestakes are cut from dormant trees and pounded into the streambank. They take root over time and help to stabilize the bank. Because of their longer lenght, they are more secure (and more likely to be successful) in eroding areas.

Image from http://www.rvca.ca/programs/shoreline_naturalization_program/images/live_stakes.jpg