RAIN GARDEN DESIGN FREE

A rain garden doesnвЂ™t have to be separate from other plantings.(See below for some of our favorite rain garden plants.) Monocultural rain gardens are okay as long as that fits with your overall design. A rain garden can be as formal or as wild as you like-itвЂ™s all about the plant selection.

RAIN GARDEN DESIGN FREE

A rain garden does not need a specific shape to function properly so feel free to be creative. Pick a shape that works with the rest of your garden design.Consider all the rules of composition, screening and circulation-not just the rule that says to put a rain garden in a low spot 10 feet from the house.In other words, it should not be a stand-alone feature. Think of a rain garden just like a border or foundation planting rather than a beloved specimen tree.ThatвЂ™s a good start, but your rain garden runs the risk of just floating out there, awash in lawn and disconnected from your bigger design picture. The online guides will tell you to locate a rain garden 10 feet from your house and at a natural low spot. Essentially, you dig a basin, plant some water-tolerant plants, mulch it in well, and redirect your downspouts to the hole. More than a dozen rain-garden designs can easily be found on the Internet. Swaths of pennisetum and other grasses convert a large, shallow-draining swale into a textural garden. Entire towns, such as Maplewood, Minnesota, have turned to rain gardens to handle neighborhood storm-water management, plunking little planted basins down between curbs and property lines.ДЇeatured in: Garden Design's Top 10 Garden Trends for 2022 ('Gardening for a Changing Climate') Rain gardens have gained wide residential use in cities as diverse as Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon (the latter two offer utility-bill discounts for rain-garden installation). Rain gardens can work in most climates, but are most effective in regions with a natural groundwater hydrology-that is, areas with deep soils that drink in water rather than rocky areas that force rain to run overland. Rain gardens are intended to counteract both the unnatural runoff patterns in urban and suburban areas (too many roads, too much paving, too many hard surfaces) as well as the increased crud levels found in them. Historically that water would have infiltrated-soaked in-leaving impurities behind in the soil and plants as it passed through to replenish the water table. Photo by: Rob Cardillo.ДЄccording to the EPA, much of the rain that falls on a typical city block heads overland to the nearest pipe, washing along any crud it finds. Naturalized plantings, here camassia, can make a rain garden fit easily into its surroundings.

Rain garden design