The Wall Street Journal – The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has embarked on a $17.2 million overhaul intended to slash consumption and waste of one of the garden’s most critical resources: water. Each year, the botanic garden uses about 22 million gallons of water to fill a 1-acre pool in its Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. That water flows by stream to a smaller pond to the south, and is eventually discharged into the municipal sewer system.
That annual draw—which doesn’t include water used for irrigation—will shrink by about 95% to an estimated 900,000 gallons under a high-tech water conservation project now under way. Botanic garden officials say it is the first of this scale and complexity in North America.
