Couple turn home into artificial ecosystem
Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 17, 2009
Early spring rain funneled off the roof of Laura Baker's Berkeley home and flowed into a downspout that connects to a gutter, which directed water into planter boxes containing her prized willow trees.
The excess water was transported in pipes under the planter boxes to a pond that is home to a menagerie of wildlife, including frogs, dragonflies, mayflies, hawks, turkey vultures and other birds.
Baker, 62, and her husband, Lewis Lubin, 56, have turned their Roble Road garden into an artificial ecosystem with a drainage network that saves water and provides wildlife habitat.
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"We're astonished about how easy it was to do this," Baker said. "We feel it is just unconscionable to think about wasting water at this point. Once you become conscious of that and change your mind-set, it just gets easy."
The couple used only 147 gallons of water a day during the last East Bay Municipal Utility District billing period. That's 100 gallons a day less than the average used by the utility's 1.3 million customers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
While some people may save even more, Baker and Lubin have done it without drastically changing their lifestyle. Their water savings occurred even though their home is nearly 3,000 square feet with a garden that covers almost 2 acres.
The couple have planted native plants, trees and grasses from one end of their property to the other, an area covering two lots where homes burned to the ground in the 1991 East Bay hills fire.
Drip irrigation is used on some of the new plants. Others are planted in areas where water naturally accumulates and they are later transplanted. Baker said the native plants don't need any watering once they are established because they have evolved over the eons to handle the California climate, which typically has little to no rain from late spring to fall.
"We've planted a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers, but mostly during the summer we let it go," Baker said. "That's one of the great advantages of using native plants."
As the conservation chairwoman of the California Native Plant Society, Baker is well-equipped to save water on her garden. But she and her husband have taken conservation measures inside their home, too.
They use plastic buckets and tubs to collect all excess water in the kitchen sink and shower. They use water to get wet during showers, then shut it off until it is time to rinse. The dishwasher is run only when it is full. Water collected in the shower and sink is used to flush the toilets.
"We just don't let the water run anywhere," Baker said. "Any wastewater that we can, we use." The couple plans to install a gray-water system to replace the tub-and-bucket system when they have the time and money, Baker said.
The effort is their way of honoring the previous owner of the house, Albert Everett Wieslander, a prominent silviculturist who spearheaded a U.S. Forest Service survey of California native vegetation in the 1930s that is now widely used as a resource.
The large manzanita bushes he had planted in his backyard were famous among arborists and naturalists. But his home and most of his neighbors' homes were burned down in the 1991 fire. He died at the age of 103 while rebuilding the house.
Baker and Lubin purchased Wieslander's rebuilt home 16 years ago not knowing anything about their famous predecessor. They also bought the burned out lot next door and set about creating a native garden on both properties. Baker said it was much later that they found out about Wieslander's pioneering work in the study of native grasses and plants.
Mixed in among the sneeze weed, caterpillar flower, coyote brush, cow parsnip and yellow sticky monkey flower is the remainder of Wieslander's manzanita.
"It's a wild, weedy look, but I love it because that's what California is," Baker said. "One of the other goals of our garden, besides beauty, is to provide defensible space. You don't have to have a denuded property in order to be fire safe."
Baker's garden connects with open space owned by Caltrans. An occasional fox or coyote can sometimes be spotted lounging by the backyard pond, which is fed by a little waterfall run by a recirculation pump perpetually flowing over a stone wall.
"All this is a work in progress," she said, standing beside the pond. "We're going to keep planting more."