In 1970, at the dawn of America’s environmental movement, Joni Mitchell wrote a song about the paving of paradise. Four and a half decades later, an inspirational immigrant whose family fled war-torn Bangladesh reversed the process in Kent, Washington. And by doing so, helped to protect Puget Sound.
Soon after arriving in King County in 2016, Tahmina Martelly signed on as manager of Resiliency Programs for World Relief Seattle. Through that program, she envisioned and led an innovative effort to tear up an unused hillside parking lot and replace it with food gardens and a rain-collection system--diverting many thousands of gallons of polluted storm runoff before it could reach the Duwamish River and Elliott Bay on Puget Sound.
With seed money from King Conservation District, Tahmina commissioned a conceptual design by a local firm, Stone Soup Gardens. That effort attracted more partners, including Construction for Change, an international nonprofit that helps leverage infrastructure to improve quality of life; The Nature Conservancy; and Sustainability Ambassadors, which led Rain Garden Design Seminars at nearby Mill Creek Middle School, teaching the seventh graders about the garden project and incorporating them into the rain garden design process.
Tahmina recalls her initial impressions of sitting in the Hillside Church parking lot with Pastor Ev Tustin and brainstorming ideas. “One of the first things I thought was this would make an amazing garden,” she says. “It’s right in the middle of everything. It’s near a transit line. It’s officially a food desert, meaning people here have low access to fresh produce or food within a one-mile radius. It’s an acre right on a major street. You can get off the bus right there. A lot of refugees and immigrants live nearby.”
Depaving began in June 2017. By May 2018, more than forty-five work parties and more than a thousand volunteers had removed twenty-two thousand square feet of asphalt and gravel, built garden plots with cinderblocks, and handlaid irrigation lines. Eighty percent of the water used to irrigate the gardens during dry periods is collected from the expansive roof of the church and piped into aboveground cisterns that hold sixteen thousand gallons, made possible by funding from King County WaterWorks.
For Tahmina, the parking lot plots are more than a garden complex, and more than a pollution prevention project. “Because the people who are served by this garden are asylees, immigrants, and refugees, it’s a metaphor,” she says. “When you take barriers away, new things can grow.” She adds, “Here we are capturing water from this roof that would have rolled off into the stormwater system. And now it is being used for something so amazing. There is something miraculous about it.”