Antiques & Garden Fair
Rain gardens offer beautiful benefits
A rain garden helps to improve the environment and reduce flooding.
For homeowners who enjoy gardening, their garden is a year-round source of beauty, providing color and texture, fragrance, and movement, as well as habitat for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife. A rain garden offers these many pleasures plus the opportunity to have a positive impact on water quality.
Know why they work When properly placed, installed, and planted, a home rain garden can reduce the amount of annual stormwater runoff from a home landscape by up to 25 percent. Instead of rainfall being diverted to storm sewer systems or contributing to flooding, a rain garden captures and stores rain for a few hours or several days, providing time for it to soak into the soil. Allowing rainfall to be absorbed by the soil benefits the environment. Landscapes have greater access to soil moisture, and local and regional groundwater supplies are recharged. A rain garden helps filter pollutants, including fertilizers and pesticides, before stormwater reaches nearby lakes, rivers, and streams.
Select a site Rain gardens can be installed in front of or behind a house or any structure with a roof that has gutters and downspouts. They should be located on a gentle slope no closer than ten feet from the building—but not placed over a 24 www.chicagobotanic.org/raingarden
septic system, directly under the canopy of a large tree, or where rainfall already ponds because of tight, slow-draining soils.
Make it “just right” For the average landscape, a rain garden from 100 to 300 square feet in size and four to eight inches deep will capture significant rainfall and accommodate a pleasing variety of plants. A simple soil drainage test is helpful in determining the ideal size. Rain gardens can be smaller in fast-draining soils but should be larger in slower-draining clay soil. The depth of a rain garden will depend on the slope of the land. A rain garden’s berm on its downhill side should be high enough to match the elevation of the uphill side.
Incorporate new beauty While rain gardens provide important water-quality and flood-control services, they can use the same design principles as any other attractive home garden. Before selecting a site, consider the view from inside the house or from a patio or deck. Create a design using groups of plants offering a variety of colors, heights, and textures with a variety of bloom times and winter interest. By incorporating elements of the existing landscape or such features as paths, benches, and fences, the rain garden becomes an element of a cohesive design that both homeowners and their neighbors enjoy.