Rain Gardening
Posted on June 26th, 2008 – 8:06 PMBy Jason Hammond
I love how neat their forms are and how they used a piece of plywood to shield our lawn from getting splashed with concrete.
Fred puts the finishing touch on the second of two rain gardens, off the back of the house.
Our concrete guys (Fred Lutz and his sons) were back this week to frame up and ultimately pour our rain gardens. Typical rain gardens are kidney shaped, organic depressions cut into the ground. However, in an effort to keep with our geometric theme, our architect Michael Huber had designed the rain gardens to be a series of step downs poured from concrete.
The rain gardens purpose is to manage rainwater run off from the two largest surface areas of our house, the roof, and the driveway. By trafficking the water from these two areas into the garden we help to minimize erosion, flooding and pollution that reaches ponds, streams and ultimately our drinking water.
The gardens had been designed with an overflow spout at the front of the forms but as we started forming them up, one of the concerns we had was that it would need to be very deep to hold a fair amount of water and not dump it back onto the driveway, before they reached the overflow point. In order to do so the overflow spout was starting to look a bit too exaggerated in my opinion. As a solution, one of Fred’s sons suggested we use a piece of rigid foam insulation and create a scupper like opening in the mouth of the garden, an idea that I love and can’t wait to see, once the forms come off this weekend.
3 Responses to "Rain Gardening"
Look forward to seeing the photos after the forms come off!!
Can you show how rainwater reaches these gardens ( I’m assuming from some sort of a tile tile from the gutters or roof). How much rainwater is it designed to infiltrate per hour, and does that compare with the large-appearing concrete driveway to the left?
Hi hilary,
The rain gardens are fed from the water running off of the driveway in the front (it’s designed to slope that direction). All the water from the roof is designed to run off to the rain garden located off the side of the deck (see photo taken from above of Fred working). I don’t know the exact absorption rate but we worked with our Architect Michael Huber and Kurt Luthold from Barr Engineering (both of whom worked on the design of our country watershed) to size the gardens appropriately. If you also notice we’ve placed circle cut outs filled with grass in the driveway to take in some of the water that will run down the drive as well.
Jason
