A Working Garden

An Sokolovska, whose garden was in the 2010 Somerville Garden Club Garden Tour, will talk about how her garden works to provide water and flood control. She will also discuss water storage, cisterns, French drains, gutters and other water storage and control methods.

In years past An was employed by the US Corps of Engineers as a sociologist assessing the social impacts of many of their projects in
 New England.  This work involved planning for major civil works projects controlling water, such as dams and flooding, and it is to the engineers she worked with that she owes her understanding of 
urban land and flood control.  An also had her own small-scale 
residential design/construction business where she could incorporate 
her knowledge of flood control into her work in residential  
reconstruction.
 
 


An credits a childhood spent outdoors in nature with her love of 
gardening.   As a grown up she finds inspiration in visiting and 
observing gardens and interfaces her indoor construction designs with growing space whenever possible. She believes gardens can solve 
problems of air pollution, security, flood control and more, while
 conferring beauty and peacefulness to a community.

The title of An’s talk is “A Working Garden” – meaning a garden that has a job to do.

All Somerville Garden Club meetings are free and open to the public. Meetings are held the second Wednesday of each month at the Tufts Administration Building, (TAB), 167 Holland Street, second floor, wheelchair accessible. Parking is available, and the building is a ten-minute walk from the Davis Square MBTA stop.