Besides containing attractive flowers, shrubs, trees, and other plants that beautify the community, rain gardens are healthy for the environment and the people living and working nearby.
What is an Ecologically Friendly Rain Garden?
A rain garden is a vegetative area designed, usually as a depression in the ground, to address various environmental concerns, such as conserving and decontaminating rain water, decreasing pollutants, reducing erosion, and preventing flooding. Various plants are combined into an attractive garden display designed specifically to correct some or all of these common environmental problems.
How Does a Rain Garden or Bioretention Facility Improve the Environment?
A rain garden accomplishes these eco friendly benefits by temporarily holding water from rain and storms and letting it soak slowly into the ground before it runs into streams or infiltrates the public drinking water supply.
As the polluted water seeps into the ground, contaminants are filtered through the sediment, making the water purer than the direct rain water. Because the rain water slowly infiltrates the ground over time, a rain garden also conserves the water, allowing it to be used as needed by plants in the rain garden and surrounding vegetation, rather than flowing immediately into nearby streams and going unused (or rather than pooling in a driveway or on a sidewalk, creating unsightly and unsanitary puddles).
This is a simple, attractive, and eco-friendly “green” way to treat stormwater runoff, eliminating pollutants without using expensive machinery and chemicals.
How Can Private Homeowners Use Rain Gardens to Help Care for the Environment?
Often, local governments and private businesses contract with landscape or civil/environmental engineering firms to develop large rain gardens (usually called bioretention gardens) on their properties and in public parks as a way to improve the environment and eliminate specific flooding or erosion problems.
However, a person does not need to be a professional landscaper or environmental engineer to create a rain garden. Even individual homeowners who are eco-conscious can help the environment by building smaller rain gardens in their yards.
Planting a rain garden helps reduce pollution and improve the environment, with two added benefits:
- Rain gardens often make yards easier to maintain, due to less lawn to mow and less water damage and pooling.
- A rain garden beautifies the homeowner’s yard, making a yard not only environmentally green but literally green -- as well as other pleasing colors (depending on the types of plants and flowers added to the rain garden to help retain water).
With rain gardens, every ecologically concerned homeowner with almost any sized yard can become a part of the solution to pollution. Being environmentally green has never been greener!
Sources/References:
- Olsson Associates (civil/environmental engineering and design firm)
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, Bioretention (Rain Gardens)
- Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
- Rain Gardens of West Michigan
- King County Road Services
- Environmental Concern
- Florida Field Guide to Low Impact Development, University of Florida IFAS Extension
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Christina Downs - With over 15 years of writing and editing experience, Christina Downs currently does freelance writing, copy editing, proofreading, and ...
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