Planting Water Providence

Create the Conditions
Let the Web of Life Breathe —
depave · plant · tend
2025 - Ongoing

It began in front of my house, each heavy rain forming a river along the pavement’s edge, water rushing toward the Woonasquatucket River, and I found myself standing there watching it — observing flows forming and reforming, imagining the ground being able to receive it, imagining the whole street punctuated with small acupuncture points of porous surface filled with native vegetation, places where water could be retained, slowed.

I wish you could experience the moment when concrete is lifted and soil meets air again — the way soil, air, and the water cycle begin to interact again, and life too, all life; the transformation over time of a sealed, impervious surface, the way something that once felt fixed begins to soften, and through the act of depaving water slows where it once rushed, and the ground begins to breathe, and almost imperceptibly life returns — not because we placed it there, but because conditions are allowed to exist again, because water retention is invitation, because when water stays plants grow, roots follow and microorganisms follow and insects follow, and what once felt hard and closed becomes porous, relational, alive — through the simple act of creating a propensity, a predisposition for life to emerge again.

This became possible through the support of Groundwork Rhode Island and the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council through a joint residential grant offered as part of the “River Friendly Homes” initiative to reduce stormwater runoff.  My role in it has been that of initiator, advocate and documenter — continuing to watch, to advocate for this impervious-dominated street, to trace growth and becoming over time, and to invite others to see what becomes possible when water is retained.  Water is life.