Deborah Jones, North Delta BC

A TALE OF

THREE DITCHES

Deborah Jones, North Delta BC

Many suburban dwellers see drainage ditches as eyesores, nuisances, potential safety hazards, and even indicators of a second-class neighbourhood. My Tale of Three Ditches is not only about three ditches in my own neighbourhood, but also about my personal transformation from a ditch doubter to a ditch dabbler to a ditch enthusiast.

The setting

We live in an older area of North Delta. Our stormwater drainage system is a patchwork of concrete and plastic culverts (pipes), shallow grass-covered ditches which home-owners have adapted as part of their lawns, and a few deeper ditches -- last vestiges of the seasonal streams which probably once flowed down our slopes.

Our house sits on a lot which is shaped roughly like a quarter-piece of pie. As luck would have it, the outer edge of our piece of pie fronts the street, which means that, in relation to our total lot size, we have quite a daunting swath of municipal property to look after, roughly 65 meters long and 5 meters wide. With the exception of our driveway and a short parking strip adjacent to it, that swath of land originally featured drainage ditches of the deeper “wild and woolly” sort.

Like most stormwater drainage systems in the Lower Mainland, and indeed just about everywhere, ours eventually empties into fish habitat, without benefit of any water treatment. No, those little grates we see in gutters and parking lots don’t lead to the sewage plant! They lead to a stream, river or bay where fish are trying to survive. But at the time my tale begins, I was only vaguely aware of the significance of all this.

Ditch #1:

Neighbourhood eyesore

Alas, Ditch #1 is no more -- though in the late 1980s, when we paid the Corporation of Delta a hefty sum to install a culvert and fill the ditch, we thought we were doing a good thing.

Ditch #1 used to stretch up the street from our driveway, in full sunshine

-- a jungle of vegetation waving high above the neighbours’ tidy lawns. Despite Delta Engineering’s twice-yearly mowings, and my husband Ib’s occasional Herculean efforts with a scythe or shears, the ditch generally looked messy and unkempt by suburban standards. Neigbours continued thanking us for years after we replaced it with culvert and lawn.

Now I wonder what biological treasures might have been lurking in that ditch and on its banks. I vaguely recall thistles, grasses, garter snakes, and the occasional frog. The Great Buttercup Invasion had not yet reached our neighbourhood, so perhaps some little native plants may have had a chance there.

Ditch #2:

The triumph of ivy

Stretching in partial shade to the other side of our driveway and parking strip, Ditch #2 never quite managed to achieve the rank of Neighbourhood Eyesore. Grasses didn’t grow as exuberantly there, nor was it directly facing any neigh-bour’s front entrance.

Furthermore (saints forgive us, we knew no better!), we planted English ivy on the inside of a low retaining wall, and over time it cascaded over the wall, down the ditchbank, across the ditch and up the other side to the road, obliterating everything else in its path.

The great expanse of ivy was very healthy, tidy, and much-admired by neighbours and walkers. But back in 1998, as I gazed down upon it, I couldn’t help feeling it was too much of one thing. Ib, having patiently awaited the day when the ivy choked out the last weeds, somewhat grudgingly agreed that I could carve out a little streambed at the bottom of the ditch.

I did this (that short phrase does not do justice to the labour involved and the mountains of ivy produced), and then started lining my little creek with rocks -- rocks that appeared as I yanked out ivy roots, rocks Ib screened from our garden soil, rocks unearthed at nearby construction sites, rocks commissioned from my stepson Niels and his friend Tamara.

Ib added some cattails at the lowest end of Ivy Creek, just before it disappears into the culvert, thus creating a miniature wetland and completing my riparian vision ... or so I briefly thought.

It didn’t take long before I began imagining that the creek needed a bit of colour. I began slashing and yanking away at other bits of ivy, substituting some easy-care, drought tolerant perennials. Niels helped carve out a path just below the retaining wall; more recently (2001-2002), Ib has gotten into the ivy-clearing act too. Gradually, the ivy monolith is giving way to more varied plantings.

Beware the killer pavement

On April 9, 1999, about a year after the “daylighting” of our Ivy Creek, the Vancouver Sun published an article by Patrick Condon entitled “Beware the Killer Pavement”. Mr. Condon wrote:

“ ... curbs are evil, and I say this only partly in jest. Curbs block rainwater falling on streets from going onto the soft adjoining surfaces. Since it can’t be absorbed, it must be piped.

“Once storm water goes into a pipe, it is almost impossible to get it out again before it is dumped, dirty and torrential, into the nearest stream -- destroying fish breeding grounds in the process.”

Suddenly, I saw our neighbourhood’s old-fashioned curbless streets and remnant ditches in a whole new light, as “fish-friendly” stormwater drain-age features.

In contrast to the stormwater pipe I had seen emptying “dirty and tor-rential” into Cougar Canyon Creek at Nicholson Road, our ditches slow the torrent, thus reducing downstream erosion and allowing pollutants (road runoff, garden chemicals, carwashing soap suds, garbage, dog droppings) to settle out and/or break down through exposure to sunlight and air

Furthermore, our ditches are porous, so that some natural recharge of groundwater takes place -- good for our gardens and for water conservation.

The Stewardship Series:

Caring for wildlife at home

I jobshare a cataloguing position at Vancouver Public Library, special-izing in science and technology materials. Around the same time that I was pondering drainage issues, I also catalogued several titles in the Stewardship Series, published by Naturescape British Columbia.

As I skimmed these publications, another light bulb went on: Ditches have great potential as wildlife habitat for small animals, and as wildlife corridors for larger ones. Ditches can provide water (at least seasonally), mud, rock piles, rotting wood, shrubby cover, native and non-native berries and nectars, etc.

I ordered a couple of Naturescape publications for myself, mulled them over at length, went out to have a look at our neighbour’s ditch, pondered the books some more, looked at the ditch again ....

Ditch #3:

A pre-emptive strike

Immediately upstream from Ivy Creek lies our neighbour’s ditch, Ditch #3. It’s at the back of Peter & Carol’s property, hidden from their view by a cedar hedge. (Their lot has two street frontages, and the house is oriented toward the other frontage.) Municipal mowing and homeowner weed-whacking kept the ditch vegetation down to a dull roar ... until Peter & Carol inherited another house and, with it, a major renovation project and a huge garden. They rented out their old home, keeping it in the family till such time as their son or daughter might want to take it over.

With Ditch #1 under lawn, Ditch #2 landscaped in rocks and ivy, and Peter & Carol’s attention diverted to their new home, Ditch #3 rose to assume the rank of Neighbourhood Eyesore.

At 30 meters long and 5 meters wide, its sunny portions overflowed with reed canary grass. Even the five large yuccas and one santolina which had been planted some years before were gradually being smothered by grass.

The grass was in turn facing competition from Himalayan blackberries, which were in the early stages of takeover, arching and coiling their way up sunny banks, over the grasses and yuccas, and into the cedar hedge.

In the shadier areas, buttercups reigned supreme -- huge, succulent, and doing their best to strangle a couple of flag iris, some gladiolas, and a spread of lemon balm that, like the yuccas, all had their origins in the lovely garden behind the hedge.

Reed canary grass, Himalayan blackberries, buttercups -- invasive alien “thugs”, all of them! [(] And yet ... a habitat of sorts. Like the English ivy, they protected the soil, they held back the runoff (better than a charming stony creek, in fact) and, as I later discovered, they harboured enormous numbers of hardworking earthworms. I was beginning to see beauty even in a tangled-but-somewhat-functional mess of alien invaders, but I doubted that anyone else in the neighbourhood shared my view.

I was distressed by the thought that the ditch might be culverted, whereupon it would probably become a gravelly-weedy parking strip. Eventually, a “killer-curb” would perhaps be installed, and that would be the end of yet another stretch of natural drainage in North Delta. The ditch desperately needed a pre-emptive strike -- a splash of beautification that would stave off any neighbourhood pressure to fill it in at owner or municipal expense.

Early in 2001, with Peter & Carol’s blessing, I started to “play” in their ditch -- or rather, the Corporation of Delta’s ditch, since it’s really their property. I contacted Delta Engi-neering, to make sure they didn’t have any immediate plans for culverting, and came away with their cautious approval of my “ditch-scaping” project.

Delta would be liable if any flooding were to occur, so quite logically, they cautioned that I must (a) not interfere with the ditch’s ability to prevent flooding, and (b) not plant anything large on the outer bank of the ditch, just in case municipal work crews needed to bring in trimming or scouring equipment in the future.

Save a fish &

meet all the neighbours

The idea of gradually transforming Ditch #3 into a quasi-native, quasi-ornamental and fully functional “water feature” garden seemed like a worthy but somewhat unrealistic long-term goal. “Bit by bit, over the next 10 years,” said I. Little did I reckon on my own compulsiveness, the growing interest of passers-by, and the clever tactics of Evelyn & Rob, our new-ish neighbours immediately across the street from the ditch.

The pair of them were frequently hard at work in their own front yard, transforming it from a derelict weed patch to a showpiece worthy of Sunset Magazine. If I cleared the buttercups from so much as a square meter of ditchbank, and managed to pop in one sword fern, I’d hear, “It looks fabulous!” from Evelyn, or “Lookin’ good” from Rob.

And so I was spurred on to greater efforts. Bit by bit, the GBB (grass, blackberry, buttercup) stranglehold started to disappear, replaced by natives such as elderberry, vine maple, salal, sword fern and hardhack, mixed with various quasi-natives (cultivar cousins, naturalized immigrants) and garden perennials.

Early on in my efforts, not many walkers stopped to talk; I probably looked just too crazy to be approached -- especially as I’m not averse to gardening in the rain or in near darkness. Rob, Evelyn, and neighbour Lois with her Dachshund

Spartacus were at first my only regular visitors, keeping me entertained with friendly conver-sation as I toiled away in the mud.

Neighbour John and Cocker Spaniel Christie (her humans Grace and Albert in tow) soon joined in on the visits. As things progressed, I made the acquaintance of more and more neighbours and other strollers, joggers and cyclists, some of whom came by specifically to check up on the improvements.

Improvements?? I wasn’t so sure .... Here I was, trashing one ecosystem and not certain of any measure of success at replacing it with another one. The GBB cabal kept threaten-ing to reclaim its lost territory, and my landscape “compositions” were frequently a marathon of trial-&-error plant placement. But the new plants all thrived, with no watering other than during their initial planting.

I referred to it all as my “salmon stream restoration”, though I knew full well that no salmon could ever climb the drainage culvert up the steep escarpment to the ditch -- and even if they could, like as not they’d find no water in summer and early fall.

So the fish were a joke ... until I learned from neighbour Gary that he had found salmon fry in a larger ditch at the foot of the escarpment while collecting water for his wife Brenda’s biology class. (There’s now a GVRD fish habitat enhance-ment project in that same vicinity, where the recently-twinned sewer line crosses a creek.) So after all, though I didn’t have a salmon habitat, I did at least have a “nutrient-bearing stream”!

In praise of yuccas, stumps & woody debris

I was raised to “make do” and “waste not”, so there was no way I was going to get rid of those five established yuccas, even if they weren’t my idea of “native habitat”. They’re healthy, tough, drought-tolerant -- and probably nearly impossible to dig out anyway.

The yuccas became goalposts on my struggle up the ditch. One by one, I extricated them from their GBB captors. One by one, they became focal points around which to build little chunks of landscaping. They added coherence and a mature look to the evolving chaos.

Similarly, three old Douglas fir stumps provided more good focal points, plus of course their nutrient and habitat value for bugs, plants and woodpeckers. Following Nature-scape BC’s advice, I added more “woody debris”, some of it offered up by neighbours (especially Rob and Evelyn), some from our own garden, some from strangers’ roadside garbage piles, and all of it a great aesthetic and functional addi-tion to the ditchscape.