Rain Gardens

Water in the garden is an enormously rewarding and playful ‘material’ to work with. Water on all scales in the garden provides us with huge amounts of sensory pleasure – from lakes, stream to a calm reflective pool, people will instinctively gravcitate to the water. The sound of a garden stream is soothing and the reflections upon the surface illuminates and animates any space.

Children love water and will become lost in play for hours given a stream in which to dam and divert. I often make visits to Germany and have for many years admired this fantastic piece of urban landscape design. (2nd image below)

Water in the garden combined with children does make people wary. However, shallow streams pose a very low risk to child safety.

Water management within the urban landscape is a topic I am very passionate about. Rain Gardens are designed with the aim of capturing, diverting and storing rain water and returning water back to the soil or atmosphere.

Using any of the methods below will help break the conventional drainage chain from roof or paved surface to sewer. These methods include:

1. Green roofs – which reduce flow and cature water.
2. Stormwater planters – situated adjacent to the house capturung the guttered roof water.
3. Car park swales – vegetated channels or depressions reducing run off from paved surfaces.
4. Rain garden – a dry river bed often filled with rocks, perennials and grasses with that will become active during wet periods to transport water deeper into the garden and dissipate the flow.
5. Ponds with bog garden – with capacity to be infilled by inflowing excess water.

Rain gardens of course also allow the opportunity to grow a diverse and vaired selection of natural plants. I have deleloped a list of plants that are suitable for periodic flooding. The list includes many perennials that you would not expect to tolerate sitting with their feet in water. But they have been tried and tested on a Shropshire flood plain so I know they survive!

Perhaps you could create a rain garden – and make a positive contribution to water cycle.