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A group of second-year Landscape and Design students at Fanshawe branched out into the community and built a Rain Garden for Storybook Gardens.

Fanshawe’s second year Landscape and Design students work in co-operation with the City of London to re-design part of Gnorbert’s Garden at Storybook Gardens, creating a sustainable Rain Garden.

The students originally designed Gnorbert’s Garden last winter as part of the City of London’s Growing Naturally program.

“This program incorporates environmentally sustainable techniques into landscape design and maintenance,” said Sara Bellaire, professor of the Lanscape Design program and helped the students with the project.

It was during the post-design analysis that Bellaire and her students were able to deduce that “one particular area of the garden was susceptible to periodic flooding causing the originally proposed planting design to suffer.”

Due to the unforeseen problem, the students went back to work designing solutions to the problem.

Cameron Beck, one of Bellaire’s students who worked on the re-design, notes exactly what caused the issue.

“Water runoff from a steep slope at the back of the garden and water pooling in poor soil at the base of the slope in front of a retaining wall that was recently installed.” According to Beck, this led to the rapid deterioration of part of the garden.

In response to the issue, each student had the opportunity to propose a new design for a rain garden to be carried out. Ultimately the students were able to implement a sustainable rain garden, which not only fixed the issue but also aligned perfectly with the vision of London’s Growing Naturally program.

Bellaire, along with 12 student volunteers, installed the rain garden on Oct. 3. This project is a great example of why it is important to re-assess a project after it is done.

“As designers we tend to walk away after the project is installed and this was an opportunity to respond to some of the on-site conditions that presented themselves after the installation was complete,” Bellaire said.

Bellaire hopes that following the success of this project, the City of London will create other sample gardens.

“It would be my hope that our students could continue to provide design and installation services in public places which raises the level of awareness on environmentally sustainable landscape design solutions and our student’s capacities throughout the city.”

With the support of individuals such as city councilor Anna Hopkins, who attended the installation of the garden, Bellaire’s vision may not be far off.

The Rain Garden re-design and Gnorbert’s Garden as a whole is just one example of the handson experience that the students of Landscape and Design at Fanshawe College are receiving.

“These are the learning opportunities we are given in this program that you don’t receive by reading a textbook or listening to a lecture, they are real life scenarios that have real impacts and implications, as a student, you can’t ask for a better learning environment than that,” Beck said.

As a commerce graduate from the University of Guelph, Beck knows he made the right decision to continue his education at Fanshawe because he understands how valuable these hands on projects are for preparing him for his future career.