working with your water
Water. It is the biggest influence on the natural world and drives every decision made through the course of a landscape design. If left to its own devices it can very easily cause more destruction than any other element, at a much more expedited pace. Every project starts (or should start) with the question “What do we do with the water?”. Preston (my better half) and I had to answer this question when we moved into our home in January of 2022 when we discovered that we had an issue with, you guessed it, water.
When the wet season set in for us here in Birmingham, Preston and I discovered the reason the previous owners had left us with sand bags and a squeegee that we found during our move in. Water in your home where it’s not supposed to be isn’t something any new homeowner wants to wake up to, especially when it was something you weren’t expecting or warned about. As landscape design professionals we should’ve taken one look at the back yard and known we would have issues to correct, but not even we would’ve been able to predict the amount of damage we would be left to fix once we began to dissect just exactly what we were dealing with.
identifying and understanding the issue
Pictured here is our back yard in late 2021, before any reworking or changes of any kind had taken place, so no physical features of the yard had been manipulated in any way. This is actually a picture from the property listing, so this is as virginally as the backyard could’ve existed before we moved in, and what it looked like immediately after. These are the existing grades, rear deck, and other surrounding conditions that perpetuated the single issue that every homeowner has nightmares about. Our home sits below a main connector road and the adjoining property of our neighbors to the rear, settling us on a landing of sorts, situated in the middle of the very steep slope our neighborhood was developed on back in the 70s. Put simpler, our house is on a hill between two roads, with neighboring homes above and below us.
So, why is that significant? Our house basically acted as a dam for the water that runs off of the higher road and neighboring property.
And if you’ve ever paid attention to water moving across or alongside any road, you know that the amount is often times significant, especially in instances of constant heavy to torrential rainfall. You can see the natural slope of the yard basically created a funnel from the upland sources to the back of the house where it was subsequently held by our “dam” house (ha). That is until the dam’s spillway, which subsequently became the rear exterior door, released that water. Directly into our garage.
is this karma or a joke?
Again, something we should’ve caught from the beginning, something possibly glaringly obvious when looking at this picture, is the convergence point for the two rear slopes. Though you may think you don’t understand the concept of topography and how grade works, I can assure you that you do. Notice the way the grass to the left and the hill in the center of the frame curve into one another. If you laid down at the top of that hill and rolled where would you end up? More than likely, you would end up in urgent care due to you being too old to have rolled down my backyard like a child. If you’re reading this, and you’re actually interested in what is being discussed, you’re too old for that. My back hurt just typing that analogy out. But if you did tap into your inner child, you would stop in the section of lawn to the left of the deck. In fact, you’d roll directly into the corner created by the deck and the landscape edging that runs along the rear wall. And if you were a drop of water, you would keep rolling until something solid stopped your path. Something like, I don’t know, a garage door…..
But why? Why was the water congregating by our back door and not moving around the house as it should’ve? What was causing it to push into that corner and not follow the natural slope you can see falling along the front of the deck and the chimney into the lower yard? We tried to regrade just enough and use downspout expansion piping to divert the water away from the back door to the path it should’ve been taking, but still the issue persisted. We were at a momentary loss, regrouping on the issue and attempting to find a solution, when yet another spring storm blew in. We had prepared the back door with sand bags and reinforcements, putting a bandaid over our puncture wound. Until water seeping into our living room through the patio doors ripped that bandaid off and all the hair with it.
the underlying cause
There are two access points to the deck. One is the garage door where the flooding originated, the other is a set of French doors leading from our living room to the rear patio. When the living room began to flood along with the garage, we took a closer look at the conditions being created by the wooden monstrosity inherited with the house. We stood during the storm with the patio door open and watched as water overflowed our gutter, poured onto the deck, and was then pushed into and against our house everywhere it touched. This is when we realized the deck was the root of our water war.
In this image, you will see the cutest little chaos goblin on four legs, and also the original state of the deck. Old decking boards, elevated roughly 12” from finished grade, with a mixture of rock and pavers blocking the pathway of water from flowing underneath the house. This condition created by the previous homeowner wrapped the entire exposed perimeter of the deck. Those pavers and the deck disrupted the natural flow of water and created a new path. The pavers pushed water along the front of the deck to the opening beneath the single step, and along the side running perpendicular to the house, dumping it all eventually to the back door. Along the top of the deck, water wasn’t able to fall to grade and move into the natural topography to be taken away from the house. Rather, it would sheet flow across the deck and was held against the house, where it eventually began flooding the living room. Can you see where this is going?
The deck was in fact the root of the evil.
now that we know, what do we do?
With gusto, we destroyed it.
After already having discussed other options for the rear patio, dealing with wasps, stray cats, and countless other creatures calling the underside of it home, and discovering a numerous amount of rotten boards, the most viable solution was to remove the deck all together. We (Preston) spent an afternoon demolishing the porch, after which we discovered not only a hoard of tennis balls lovingly left behind, but also the extent of the damage that had been done to the house over the years of being inundated with water. Could it have been worse? Certainly. Did we still have flooring and siding to replace and stairs to build? Of course we did. Did this resolve the flooding issue? Yes….but.
After the first week or so of living without a deck, we noticed the flooding had been stopped, but a water issue still existed, just in a different setting. Though it was no longer being held against the house, the water still had nowhere to go due to the concrete pad found under the deck and the yard directly in front of the concrete having significant slope issues of their own. It would travel as far as it could with the natural slopes available and then pond. Which you can imagine only tracked sunshine and roses onto the floors of the house, not nasty, muddy, silty paw prints. Every day. Multiple times a day.
We fixed one problem, and a million more (three) popped up. So, what’s next?
as the age old saying goes, you don’t have to go home, but…
The water that continued to stand on the patio couldn’t be left unaddressed. That’s how you get mosquitos, stinky smells, and a floor that is never clean of tiny dirty toe bean prints. But in true form to both Preston and I being landscape design professionals, we in fact did leave it unaddressed. For about a year, actually. Preston regraded the perimeter of the pad to allow enough water to move off the concrete that the ponding wasn’t as prevalent, and then we left it to it’s own devices. We were doing something akin to management throwing their staff a pizza party for morale. Simple placation, not in any way true resolution. You’ll get that on these bigger jobs.
But finally, through some miracle of a wild hair, I decided one day it was time to remedy the situation. Through what felt like seven years of digging through clay, roots, rocks, and brick shards left over from the original build, I was able to create a drainage channel that would conduct the water into a proper drainage path. Now of course, it couldn’t just be a simple swale, that would be too easy, too quickly executed. Of course, I had to make it a design feature to enhance the overall design of the backyard while still functioning as a utility area. And of course, I couldn’t just sit down for maybe an hour and think it through and come up with an actual plan for this area and sketch it out super quick so that I had something to work from and not my constantly contemplate why I do things the way that I do, and why I am the way I am. It just wouldn’t be me if it were any other way.
So, I spray painted my shoes several times laying it out and then laying it out again when I hated the first, second, and yes the third layout. I scavenged any and all materials we could use that we already had on site because, waste reduction and also, I didn’t want to buy them. I built a peninsula, a peninsula, coming off the patio. I graded out curves that ran with the existing natural topography and smoothed the top of the slopes of the walls for stabilization and * aesthetic *.
I hand graded the channel to make sure it had enough fall (slope) for the water to move, and then I hand graded it again when I was sure it was wrong (repeat 3-4 times) and then I asked Preston to redo it again so that it would for sure be right. He’s infinitely better and much more knowledgable than I am when it comes to grading and understanding topography, and I am in no way hesitant when admitting it. Does that mean I can’t do it or don’t understand it? No. But something that takes me a day to do would take him probably an hour. It’s just the way his brain works. Everyone has their niche, their specialty. The thing that comes to them as if it’s inherently engrained in them from day one. I’m art, plants, and biology and he’s math, stormwater, and the science of a site.
Did it begin as me intentionally designing and building a solution specifically for the water issue? No. Was I really just moving Canna Lily tubers from front to back yard, and upon deciding where they were going to go needed more room around the chimney for them to live without looking dumb? 1000%. BUT - Did I solve both problems with one solution that I worked out as I was building it, with little to no planning or drawing or really any clear path to the other end of the tunnel, running on coffee and murder podcasts and rage and hope?
You better believe it.
If you’ve made it this far…
I hope you’ve enjoyed this recount of our first journey into homeownership, and how it brought with it challenges that we were thankfully able to lean on our combined expertise and very expensive educations (lol) to fix. The last images you will see on this post, are the progress shots of where the planting started and what it looks like as of Tuesday, June 25th, 2024. I planted the canna lily tubers back when I first began this project in March and as a result they are showing up and showing out right on schedule. The other initial plantings were comprised mainly of plants we took from around our property, including daylilies gifted by Preston’s mom, volunteer snowdrops that just appeared in that spot of the yard in the spring of 2022, crocosmia (and the cannas) that came with the property, and a few 4” containers of lambs quarter and forget-me-nots to liven it up just a bit. The rest of the plants came in waves. Mosquito plants bought with a round of vegetable seedlings for the garden. More cannas, iris, and daylilies, graciously gifted by my Aunt Susan from her own yard. One random pumpkin plant that seeded in last years compost pile, from our fall front door decor. And whatever other here and there’s we see that we think would work for this area, not only from a visual perspective, but an ecological and functional one as well.
This drainage way will continue to evolve. As I type this, we’ve already begun scheming on how to add another channel to drain the other side of the concrete slab and tie it into this one. The plantings will change to create a more sustainable and healthy habitat within the design element. We will plant things in our yard, only to decide to move them to this location, and we will do it more than once. All of that is to say, nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. I tell my clients all the time, just because I designed it doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. Any and all designs are adaptable to the evolution of perception, and designers should be as well. We designed something and we built it by hand. Spent days, weeks, and as of now months fine tuning and adding finishing touches here and there, and have invested so much energy into this one small spot of our property. But that doesn’t mean we’ll die on the hill of keeping it if change is needed to maintain a healthy, happy, sustainable landscape.
Because at the end of the day its a ditch. A design solution that is very often integrated into many landscapes for a variety of conditions, all with the same goal of water management. This is something you will surely see in designs of not only mine but other project settings that need simple, functional, and aesthetic ways of dealing with this situation, without just piping it and dumping it out of sight only to create the same issue somewhere else. The moral of this final rambling monologue is to not only be open but to embrace the changes the natural world will always demand of us. Instead of furiously working against the issue in your yard, trying in vain for resolution with quick and easy momentary placations, lean into it. Lean into the water. Figure out where it wants/needs to go and help it along its way. Working with nature is unimaginably easier than working against it.
love always & be kind,
Emily
