In 2017, we designed and built the world’s first Rain Park in South Orange, NJ. It was a huge deal for us and really set a new direction for the thinking around green infrastructure, public parks and community engagement. However, things didn’t go as plan for getting lots of amazing plants to grow in the new space. The lack of flowers and other nice things to look at caused a bit of an uproar, so we have doubled efforts to get the Rain Park moving in the right direction. The new direction has given us a chance to also show how landscape design can be as much an art form as a gardening and maintenance. 

Invasive plant species are a huge problem. They have overtaken giant expanses of the landscape. As they do, they erase the ability for native plants and animals to thrive, and there’s no easy solution to get rid of them. But there is a bit of a silver lining. When I was walking along the bank of a river about a week ago, I came across a few very amazing plants that had beaten the odds among a mess of knotweed and porcelain berry (two of the worst offenders of the invasive mob).