Chicago River revival: Fall gardeners take to canoes to restore the banks

CHICAGO — While most fall gardeners are kneeling in flower beds, there’s a group in Chicago that is loading shovels onto canoes.

This Friends of the Chicago River group says their best plants grow along this river’s banks.  It’s a mission called Paddle and Plant. 

The volunteers are a group of makeshift gardeners who are bringing life back to a river once forgotten.  

When they started eight years ago, the riverbanks were little more than mud and memory choked with invasive plants, leaving the water sluggishly silent. 

Through friends of the Chicago River, the group of volunteers took to the banks, armed with paddles and flats of native sedges, they began to dig, plant, and hope.

Bit by bit, the banks came alive.

More information on their website.

Through a 2024 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Friends of the Chicago River, a plan is being mapped out to install thousands more plants along the entire 156 miles of the river. They are calling it the River Shallows Project and hope it will continue to stabilize the shoreline through aquatic habitat.