Waterloo Road Rain Gardens

With planned utility upgrades on the way, the City of London decided to embark on a pilot project to implement rain gardens on Waterloo Road. Their goal was to see how this green infrastructure would do on a busy road and to start a neighbourhood beautification project with the community.

There were many challenges but most notable were the existing locations of utility boxes and the need to protect mature trees in the area. This led to concern that the impervious to pervious ratio may be too high; however, with our counsel, the client decided to move to an increased ratio common in Western Canada as part of the pilot. Our civil engineering and landscape architecture teams designed a solution which included the removal of some trees to accommodate for rain gardens, modification of the rain garden design to ensure the roots of existing trees were not damaged within the drip line, and modified inlets to support a new neighbourhood maintenance program.

Waterloo Road has become a beautiful boulevard that supports low-impact development (LID) and green infrastructure (GI) design by featuring rain gardens and functional landscaping that includes the surrounding community in its maintenance.