Rain Gardens for HomeownersAuthor: Thomas G. Franti, Ph.D., P.E., University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Rain gardens are designed to be an aesthetically pleasing feature of your landscape. The photos provided here show rain gardens in many phases of construction and development. Because rain gardens use plants as their major aesthetic feature it may take a few growing seasons until plants reach maturity and develop the beauty you are tying to create.
>>Power point slides of a basic Rain Garden installation
More information on Rain Garden projects can be found under Low Impact Development on the Property Design & Management pages of this water Web site. Rain garden site for City of Lincoln, Nebraska Kansas City 10,000 Rain Gardens project University of Wisconsin Extension publication: Rain Gardens: A how-to manual for homeowners*pdf |
Resources
Rain Gardens
*pdf format. Download the required Acrobat Reader free. |
Homeowners can reduce water runoff from their yards by using a functional and aesthetic design practice called a rain garden. A rain garden is a small area in a residential yard or neighborhood planted to flowers and ornamental grasses designed to temporarily hold and soak in rain water that comes from a house roof, driveway or other open area. A rain garden is not a pond or wetland. It is dry most of the time and holds water after a rain. Water collected in the rain garden slowly infiltrates into the soil to support plant growth. In a properly sited and designed rain garden standing water disappears in less than 48 hours.
Other rain garden resources:
