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So much activity occurs in the parking areas of garden stores on busy springtime days. There is constant movement of people and plant materials; carts of flowers, trunks and tailgates open, trailers extended out into the drive lanes, pots being fitted into back seats, large trees hoisted up and on to trucks, loading of bags of mulch and soils, loaders and forklifts blocking the driveway areas as well as customers, often with children, in and out of vehicles watching, loading, helping, and talking. We are aware of this unusual activity and have designed our parking areas to accommodate these situations.
“I will never shop at that place again. The parking spots are too narrow and someone always dings my car.”
The main parking area is located on the side of the complex. This is the largest of four parking options for our customers during the season. There is a also front parking lot and limited street parking on several sides of the complex.
In addition, we have arranged with a neighboring large church next to the business for overflow parking (excluding Sundays) in those crazy months of high volume.
“We provide several services to the church for this privilege. They receive springtime bedding flowers for their landscaping at our cost, we hire some members of the church to direct traffic in this lot and to shuttle our customers and their goods to and from the store with an extended seated golf cart and trailer, and we support their weekly church program bulletins with our advertising”
Parking lots of businesses can be a tremendous source of pollution in the environment. Our design provides a minimum carbon footprint and still allows for the convenience of our customers. The surface of the lot is a combination of asphalt and compacted gravel. The asphalt, recycled asphalt, is installed on the driving paths of the lot. We have also built collection basins in the drive lane asphalt for gathering runoff. There are large changeable filter shields in the basins that collects any spilled hydrocarbons from the vehicles.
Gravel is the surface for the actual parking stalls. We allow natural grasses to grow from the ground, through the gravel to form a tight uniform mat over the gravel. Any vehicle leakage is filtered through the grasses and gravel before moving into the groundwater. Concrete recycled “curb stops” are positioned and construction "whiskers" are used to indicate the stalls. Mindful of the unusual length and widths of our customer vehicles, we have scaled the parking stalls to be longer and wider than a normal commercial standard. Because the lines marking the stalls cannot be effectively pronounced on a gravel surface, we are mindful that there will be some haphazard parking on the stalls and some dirt and mud in the stalls from time to time. On balance however, this parking area provides an efficient, economical and “green” contribution by green garden gates. We continue to search for other methods to develop permeable stalls and heavy load bearing parking lot drive lanes.
It has been our experience that "swales" and "retention basins" are marginally effective and expensive. Basically these are "ditches" near a parking lot where all the runoff from that lot runs into the ditch. The theory is that if the ditches are planted, all the dirty runoff water from the parking lot will filter through the plants and roots and end up clean when it reaches the groundwater. Bull. What happens is that, no matter what you do to try to correct it, these ditches stop draining and they fill up with water and some will start to stink. You can get a bobcat in there and churn it all up and two weeks later you have standing water again. So what you have it a bunch of ditches filled will water breeding mosquitoes. The tree huggers just love these things but they are a pain in the ass. Another drawback is that these dirty water ditches take up a lot of real estate. They need to be wide and deep so forget any other uses. They are just ditches. These ditches are the accepted method in most cities. In Tulsa, we were able to convince the government that using catch basins with removable changeable filters will do the same thing.
We have also designed in this parking area, an area for large vehicles with long trailers out of the main firing line of activity where they can maneuver and park more easily and safely.
We believe, at green garden gates, that the shopping experience does not end at the cash register. We will be judged whether we succeed or fail with our customers only when the plants and products are carefully placed in the vehicles and the customer is driving out our gates. In our operational chapters discussed later, we talk about how we hire young people to patrol all of the parking areas with golf carts making certain we have happy gardeners right until the end of this experience.
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