WHEATON, MD—The national Sustainable Sites Initiative™ (SITES™) announced the selection of two Montgomery County Department of Parks projects for testing the nation’s first rating system for green landscape design, construction and maintenance: the rain garden at Brookside Gardens and design and construction for Evans Parkway Neighborhood Park. The SITES program is the landscape equivalent of the environmental rating system for buildings known as LEED® Green Building Rating System™.
“We are very pleased to be on the cutting edge of sustainable design in Montgomery County and honored to be chosen,” said Director of Parks Mary R. Bradford. “Sustainability and environmental stewardship are core values of the Department of Parks.”
These two county parks projects will join more than 150 other projects from 34 states as well as from Canada, Iceland and Spain in an international pilot project program to evaluate the new SITES rating system for sustainable landscapes with and without buildings. Sustainable landscapes can clean water, reduce pollution and restore habitats, while providing significant economic and social benefits to land owners and municipalities.
SITES, a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden, selected Brookside’s Rain Garden based on its extensive environmentally friendly elements. These sustainable practices include: capturing storm water on site to eliminate discharge and siltation into a nearby stream, reusing existing building materials and plants, increasing density of plants, using native plants and protecting existing soils and trees.
Evans Parkway Neighborhood Park is an existing 7.3 acre park in Wheaton. The proposed design for this park features the restoration of an existing concrete-lined stream to a natural state with native vegetation and riparian plantings. The park includes a variety of recreational facilities to serve the needs of the community and will also include public art and educational components. The project is expected to serve as a demonstration project for future naturalization efforts within the county and invite greater community interest in watershed improvements.
“Our innovative public gardens and park development projects are in excellent company in this national pilot,” added Bradford.
Brookside Gardens and Evans Parkway Neighborhood Park join the Smithsonian Institution’s African American History and Culture Museum, a New Orleans project to absorb storm water on the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and other pilot projects that include academic and corporate campuses, public parks with hundreds of acres, transportation corridors and private residences of less than one acre.
Brookside’s Rain Garden developed from a partnership with the Low Impact Development Center (Beltsville, Maryland) in conjunction with a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (Bayscapes Program) grant for a model rain garden. The garden was designed by Ann English, RLA, ASLA, LEED AP, and a Rainscapes Program Planning Specialist for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Watershed Division, but who was with the Low Impact Development Center when she designed the garden. The construction was done by J&G Landscape Design, Spencerville, Maryland. The 1200-square-foot site was developed to create an interpreted public garden demonstrating this new concept of storm water management for Brookside’s 400,000+ annual visitors and to solve a chronic runoff problem on the site. Plants for the rain garden were supplied in part by DEPs Rainscapes program and a local garden club.
Design is now underway for the renovation of Evans Parkway Neighborhood Park by a consulting team led by Oculus, landscape architects, along with Ecotone, Inc., environmental consultants, and Bohler Engineering. Construction is expected to be completed by summer 2012.
Pilot project sites will test the point system for achieving different levels of site sustainability on a 250-point scale and the performance benchmarks associated with specific credits within the Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009.
SITES will use feedback from this and the other selected projects during the pilot phase, which runs through June 2012, to revise the final rating system and reference guide by early 2013. The U.S. Green Building Council, a stakeholder in the Sustainable Sites Initiative, anticipates incorporating the guidelines and performance benchmarks into future iterations of its LEED® Green Building Rating System™. More information is available at: http://www.sustainablesites.org. For general media queries about SITES, go to: http://www.sustainablesites.org/news/.
About the Sustainable Sites Initiative
The Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) is an interdisciplinary partnership led by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden to transform land development and management practices with the nation's first voluntary rating system for sustainable landscapes, with or without buildings. As these guidelines become the accepted practices by professionals and nonprofessionals alike, they will transform the ways we design and build on the land, creating landscapes that nourish life for generations to come. For more information, visit www.sustainablesites.org.
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Contact:
Kelli Holsendolph
Media Relations Manager
Montgomery County Department of Parks
301-650-2866
Leslie McDermott
Marketing & Media Relations Manager
Brookside Gardens
301-962-1427
