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Tag: Ponds

  • PBOT Warns Drivers to Watch for Ponds and Slick Spots with Heavy Rains & Winds – KXL

    PHOTO: PBOT Portland Dot Gov

    PORTLAND, Ore. — The Portland Bureau of Transportation is reminding drivers to use extra caution over the next several days with the forecasted strong rain and winds.

    PBOT says ponds can appear on the roads in spots in a hurry with strong fall storms.  Especially when the storm is one of the first big ones of the season and there are a lot of leaves that still need to come off trees.

    They say sometimes ponds can appear because of leaves blocking storm drains.  Other times it’s due to construction or just the shape of the roads working together with gravity.

    When in doubt, they say it’s best just to use caution, slow down and call the city if you notice any particularly bad spots.

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    Brett Reckamp

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  • Garden of Eden: The Most Beautiful Spot in Brooklyn Happens to Be in an Industrial Park (Seriously) – Gardenista

    This week, we’re revisiting some of our all-time favorite stories about gardening in New York City. Cultivating plants in the Big Apple comes with challenges—yards tend to be small and shady, and privacy is rare—but if you have the patience, these urban gardens can produce some big-time magic. Behold…

    High levels of arsenic and lead in the soil, a decrepit factory building, a courtyard roofed over with half-rotted plywood and tarpaper and paved in concrete—we’ve all heard this Brooklyn story at least once. But surprise, there’s a happy ending for one garden on an industrial block in East Williamsburg.

    When FABR Studio + Workshop partners Thom Dalmas, Bretaigne Walliser, and Eli Fernald discovered the skeleton of a 700-square-foot courtyard while remodeling a building for clients, they were able to see beyond the grit. They decided to site their company headquarters in a first-floor studio space (see the interiors on Remodelista) and—in a genius move—to install steel factory doors to connect their office to a courtyard garden. (N.B.: FABR has since disbanded, with Dalmas and Walliser starting TBo Architecture.)

    The problem? The plan required them to create a courtyard garden from scratch, which required a leap of faith. “We dug up the whole concrete floor—broken slabs and dirt—and removed layers of plywood and tarpaper, and rebuilt a garden wall,” said Bret. “At that point we tested the soil—and it was shockingly high with lead and heavy metal. It was essentially a brown field site.”

    The solution? They remediated the dirt below the concrete with ground-up fish bones and fish meal (to render the heavy metals inert) and carted topsoil one wheelbarrow at a time to create a healthy foundation for plants. “It took a week and smelled like low tide for days, but the plants are absolutely thriving,” said Bret.

    The result? Magic. Read on and see if you agree:

    Photography by Matthew Williams.

    Above: “We’ve been building up and layering the palette out there,” said Bret. Potted plants clustered at the edge of a koi pond include tropical caladiums, a decorative orange tree, and a lime tree.

    In a neighborhood where rusting construction cranes and corrugated sheet metal are far more common sights than butterflies and bees, Fabr Studio created an oasis both for themselves and for the next generation of insects and humans (Bret and Tom are partners in life as well as in work, and have two young children who have named all the fish).

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  • Protecting your pets from harmful algal blooms – WTOP News

    Virginia-based veterinarian Alexandra Reddy warns pet owners about the dangers of blue-green algae in lakes and ponds during the summer.

    The final weeks of summer weather can prompt pet owners to squeeze in as much outdoor time with their pets as possible, but Alexandra Reddy, a veterinarian with the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, says to be cautious around lakes and ponds.

    Warm weather can lead to algal blooms, most of which are harmless. But Reddy said the blue-green algal blooms caused by cyanobacteria are harmful to pets, as well as people.

    A dog who swims or wades in water where the cyanobacteria is present can be affected in one of two ways. In the case of a toxin that attacks the liver, a dog may experience “vomiting, diarrhea,” Reddy said.

    And in the case of the bacteria that affects the nervous system, “They can start to have seizures and it eventually progresses to paralysis,” she said.

    So allowing dogs to run off leash into ponds or lakes where there’s evidence of algal blooms “is not a risk you want to take,” Reddy said.

    If a dog demonstrates any signs of illness after coming in contact with water where an algal bloom is present, Reddy told WTOP, “Rush them to a hospital, don’t wait.”

    Unfortunately, Reddy explained, there is no antidote for exposure to toxins from blue-green algae. She said the treatment consists of supportive care.

    “So if the animal is in that respiratory distress, you’re going to give them the oxygen support they need,” she said. “They’ll have anti-seizure medications.”

    And if they’re vomiting and becoming dehydrated, they should get fluids, Reddy said.

    Even playing with sticks that are found along the shoreline of a lake or pond where algal blooms are present is a bad idea, Reddy said.

    “If it has any little residue, one little piece of it is enough to be toxic,” she said.

    Health departments across the D.C. region do monitor public bodies of water for algal blooms and will post warnings if a toxic bloom has been detected.

    In Virginia, the Department of Health posts a dashboard with a map complete with times, locations and results of the most recent testing.

    In Fairfax County, officials recently warned of algal mats and blooms at Lake Accotink in Springfield. The Fairfax County Park Authority said in a post on Facebook over the weekend that the blooms are normal in the summer months but lake-goers should take precautions.

    Reddy said it’s important to note that the information won’t contain ponds on private property.

    Public information campaigns from the Virginia Department of Health have warned the public to take care when visiting ponds or lakes and urging people to follow the advice of, “When in doubt, stay out” of waterways that may be affected by algal blooms.

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    © 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

    Kate Ryan

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  • 10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

    10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

    It’s no coincidence if Japanese gardens remind you of those scene-in-a-shoebox dioramas you made in grade school.

    A Japanese garden is a miniature world full of abstract shapes–rocks, gravel, and cloud-pruned plants–designed to represent the larger landscape of nature. And Nature. For centuries, Zen Buddhist monks and other Japanese landscaping designers have been trying to provoke deep thoughts, with design elements such as raked gravel paths and moss checkerboards and tiny bonsai trees trained to look permanently windswept.

    A Deep Question: How do you channel all those centuries of serenity to add a bit of Zen to your garden?

    The Answer: Steal one or more of our favorite 10 garden ideas from Japan:

    Featured photograph by Ye Rin Mok, for Creative Spaces, from LA Noir: Architect Takashi Yanai’s Humble-Chic Bungalow.

    Japanese Maple Trees

    A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.
    Above: A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.

    Plant a lacy Japanese maple. There are hundreds of different varieties of Acer palmatum, the maple tree native to Japan. With gracefully articulated leaves and diminutive stature (most don’t grow taller than 30 feet), Japanese maples tuck themselves easily into nearly any size garden. Varieties with multi-branched trunks have a sculptural quality and become a natural focal point in the garden.

    For more ideas, see Japanese Maples: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.

    Landscape Rocks

    Above: Boulders as sculpture at a Japanese dry garden in Ithaca, NY. Photograph by Don Freeman, from Designer Visit: A Gray and Green Garden at Tiger Glen.

    Use rocks as a design element. In Japanese gardens, the pleasing shapes of large rocks and craggy boulders are reminders of the larger natural landscape that surrounds us. Depending on the size and shape, a rock also can serve as a functional element–as seating or a table–in the garden.

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  • Marsh Marigold: A Native Alternative to Invasive Lesser Celandine

    Marsh Marigold: A Native Alternative to Invasive Lesser Celandine

    In summer our thoughts turn for refuge to cooling streams and pond edges, and to memories of a spring blaze of marsh marigold and moving water. Early to bloom, and in lush leaf through summer, marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) are a cold-hardy and water-loving perennial. They are also a native alternative to their diminutive lookalike, the highly invasive lesser celandine (Ficaria verna). Differentiating between the two plants is helpful to curb the spread of one, and to encourage the cultivation of the other.

    Photography by Marie Viljoen.

    Above: Marsh marigolds have between 5 to 9 petal-like sepals, and have a mounding habit.
    Above: Lesser celandine has 8 to 12 petals, and a carpeting habit.

    Both marsh marigolds and lesser celandine have buttercup-perfect, iridescent yellow flowers that signal their kinship: they belong to the Ranunculus family. But in North America lesser celandine, a transplant from Europe (it is also occurs natively in North Africa and West Asia), has mastered the insidious creep, smothering regional swathes of riverside and forest floor, altering habitats as it spreads its low but impenetrable canopy. Lesser celandine’s invasive status is mostly associated with the Northeast, but it is moving into the Midwest and occurs in the Pacific Northwest, too. In places where it grows beside moving water, flooding carries parts of the plant downstream, where they take root.

    Above: Marsh marigolds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

    Marsh marigold’s species name palustris means “of marshes.” Varieties of marsh marigold have an unusually wide native distribution, described as circumboreal: The plants occur across the northern part of the planet (boreal means north), in North America, Europe, and Asia. The plant’s flowers are larger and more showy than lesser celandine’s. In terms of function, marsh marigold can stabilize stream banks, forming mounded, clumping colonies over time. The flowers’ pollen and nectar are a rich food source for native pollinators, and small mammals and ducks eat the seeds.

    Above: Lesser celandine is very difficult to remove where it is widespread.

    Lesser celandine removal sidebar: The removal of lesser celandine is not easy. If you have a few clumps, remove them at once. By the time a carpet has formed, the task is daunting, and complicated. Methodical mechanical removal, by hand, is best (although difficult), and vigilance is essential. Personally, I cannot recommend glyphosate (usually sold as Roundup).

    Why not use glyphosate? There is its implication in the evolution of so-called super-weeds, for one thing. And while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers glyphosate “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) does classify  glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Quite the contradiction.

    For your own rabbit hole research consider that the studies that the IARC relied on seem more in keeping with real-world situations and exposure than those employed on by the EPA. Glyphosate has been banned by California, and in 2020. New York banned the use of glyphosate on state property. Its use is especially problematic near water, or when associated with water tables (everything lands up in the water table). Glyphosate has been showing up in stream and air samples since 2011, and its knock-on effects on life forms other than the target-plant (from soil microbes to aquatic invertebrates) are being studied.

    Above: Marsh marigolds favor flowing or oxygenated water.

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