On Saturday, March 23, 2019, Trees Atlanta and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper installed the first of two bioswales on Highland Avenue. They had the help of several volunteers from Inman Park, including Jamie Allen, Chuck Young, and Jim Abbot.

Bioswales are landscape elements intended to capture, clean, and infiltrate stormwater on site. Trees Atlanta, in the person of Kelly Ridenhour, and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, represented by Eric Fyfe, received a grant to pilot a simple and inexpensive approach to retrofitting existing street features, such as sidewalk rights-of-way and bump-outs, into bioswales.

Each new vegetated bioswale — at Highland’s intersection with Washita — will be home to one big-flowered silverbell tree (Halesia diptera var. magniflora), together with ground cover including Virginia sweetspire, eastern bluestar, river oats, coneflowers, and more.