The Red Oak Rain Garden (RORG) is a sustainable landscape that celebrates rain, invigorates the campus and community educational experience, and promotes well-being. Located between Allen Hall and the McKinley Health Center, the RORG was the first rain garden on the Urbana campus.

This 2019 update to the aesthetically beautiful green space feature, first established in 2006, also provides flood protection, improves water quality, and promotes ecological health. Eliana Brown, a water quality specialist with Illinois Extension and the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, led the renovation team improving the area. F&S provided design consultation, and the grounds department, cement finishers, electricians, and other laborers helped establish new concrete sidewalks, move rocks, and light poles, and reshape and prepare the ground for volunteers to plant new flowers, grasses, and shrubs. The garden features 54 forbs, shrubs, and grasses planted in order to best manage rainwater, which has in the past collected into big pools, endangering the red oak’s health, and making for messy, unsafe pedestrian and bike pathways.

“The Red Oak Rain Garden is a model for how our campus landscape can be beautiful and resilient while engaging student and community volunteers in service learning,” said Brown. “F&S has been a wonderful partner on this project – contributing years of construction expertise making things go successfully. We are pleased with the improvements and look forward to enjoying this exemplary rainwater amenity for years to come.”

Red Oak Rain Garden’s Final Phase: The Bridge

To the RORG was added a brilliant, locally culled wood pedestrian bridge. Completed in June 2021, the bridge is made of local Black Locust wood from Allerton Park & Retreat Center with high tension cable railing. It is 40-feet long, 42-inches tall, and 9-feet wide.

The bridge was constructed as a way to improve pedestrian safety while offering a detailed and vivid user experience and promoting growth opportunities for the garden. “The design provides a path that honors how people want to move through the location, without harming the trees or impeding the garden’s function as a rainwater management practice” said Eliana Brown, Red Oak Rain Garden director and Extension water quality specialist.

“Additionally, it gives people a sense of immersion in a natural area – even if only for the time it takes to cross over the garden.”

The design of the bridge was approved by the F&S Architectural Review Committee (ARC), led in this case by Brent Lewis, Capital Programs, university landscape architect. “ARC looks at the university as a whole to discern whether some elements go in with the design aesthetic of campus,” said Lewis. “But you also look at areas more locally to see if they fit in aesthetically in a contextual way. That bridge wouldn’t look right on most of the campus, but in this garden space, next to housing, this fits. It is the right use of the materials and the right look for that space. These are elements that last a long time, are more natural, and help us safeguard the rain garden.”

Lewis did note the same high tension cable railing is also used at the southern expansion of Talbot Laboratory.  Environmental art also lines the walkways.