In September 2022, Lotus Water participated in the Water Flows Forward - Seeds of Innovation: Resilient Design Competition, hosted by The Water Collaborative, a grassroots organization in New Orleans, Louisiana. This year’s competition challenged teams to develop a floating planter box for indigenous communities in Louisiana’s Grand Bayou Village, a region rich with culture and history. Given the area’s unique coastal setting and vulnerability to land subsidence, water levels, and climate change, bayou communities need an adaptable planter box with the flexibility to float while planted, withstand brackish water, be transportable both on land and in water, and integrate a water catchment system.

Inspired by the opportunity to help communities build resilience and find a solution for food security, we assembled a multi-disciplinary team of engineers and planners to put our water resource minds together to create a design that was multi-functional and a reflection of the local community in New Orleans.

Our Design

The Pirogue Planter pays homage to the pirogue boats used throughout the bayous of Southern Louisiana. The planter’s innovative and modular design provides removable planter boxes, rainwater harvesting and storage, accessibility options, as well as land and water mobility. Designed for current and future conditions as sea levels rise and coastal communities, such as the Grand Bayou Village, lose land to subsidence and flooding, the Pirogue Planter reflects the communities’ culture while providing a flexible solution for food and medicinal sovereignty.

*Pirogue Planter (shown with rainwater catchment wings engaged) has flexibility to grow plants both on land and while afloat in water.*

Pirogue Planter - Key Components:

Boat shell - made of powder-coated aluminum to withstand saltwater exposure and prevent rusting. Powder-coating can be customized to showcase local identity and traditional colors. The shell geometry allows for vertical stacking and lateral tesselation, streamlining efficient storage and transport at scale.

Planter boxes – removable t-shaped aluminum planter boxes, with drainage holes, that provide soil depths of 6” through 22”. The range of planting depth was selected to allow for a variety of food and medicinal crops, such as the “Three Sisters”, to be grown together sustainably.

Rainwater catchment wings - panels of the upper hull can swing out and be locked in place using a sofa ratchet hinge, creating an angled plane that captures rainwater and routes flows through a perforated false bottom into a reservoir.

Reservoir - the boat bottom stores rainwater for watering plants. Drainage holes in the bottom of the planters, which sit above and extend into the reservoir, allow plants to access stored water through capillary action. The intermediate false bottom has two reservoir access lids where collected rainwater can also be used for hand-watering the planter or other nearby plants in the community.

Drainpipe - a drainage opening in the bottom of the boat leads to an exterior drainpipe that can be adjusted to control the depth of water storage in the reservoir. A check valve prevents brackish water from entering the reservoir when afloat. This drainpipe system still allows drainage from the reservoir when the planter is afloat even if the interior water level exceeds the water level outside the boat.

Although the Lotus team did not win the design competition, the opportunity for our staff to collaborate in new ways, stretch our creative problem-solving muscles, and apply our expertise where it’s needed most was so rewarding. It’s not every day that our team gets to perform buoyancy calcs, analyze capsize stability, and research planting almanacs! Congrats to the winners - check out their inspiring designs here.

Lotus looks forward to continuing to work with communities to plan, design, and build for resilience on future projects and competitions!