Rain Gardens

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Published: 06 July 2020

Installing a rain garden is a simple way property owners can help save our streams, rivers and wastewater systems from the strain of heavy rain events. They also help filter out the fertilizers and pollutants from landscapes and streets, before the rainwater runoff enters the larger ecosystem and our drinking water sources.

=== Video Transcript ===

Hi! I'm Alex, an educator with the Arboretum on wheels at the Boone County Arboretum, and today I'm here to talk to you a little bit about rain gardens. So if you look behind me you can see the Boone County Arboretum's rain garden display, and you can see that it's got a variety of different types of plants. We're gonna talk a little bit about what that is, and what a rain garden is, and why they're important.

So in this area, especially at this time of year, we get a lot of rain as you've probably noticed the past few days. So this rain can be good for a variety of reasons - it helps the flowers flower, it helps the grass turn green, it helps trees grow, and it helps grow our crops.

However, this rain can also be a problem. In this area, we are experiencing increasing rates of urbanization. So this means that we have less green space like the Arboretum, and more and more cement all over. This means that the rain water, instead of being absorbed into those green spaces that used to be everywhere, are just running off of this cement into the lakes, into the streams, and into our wastewater systems, which can have some really negative consequences.

One way to help combat that, is a rain garden. So as you can see rain gardens are just shallow depressions, no more usually than six to eight inches deep, that are designed to help capture some of that rainwater and help it absorb back into the ground, rather than running off into our rivers and wastewater systems. So behind us you can see that there's a variety of flowering plants, grasses, and some woody perennials. All of these types of plants behind me love water, and that helps absorb the water back into the ground.

Now, rain gardens have a couple common misconceptions - one of the big ones is that they're really deep holes in the ground and that that makes them dangerous. But as you can see, it's not very deep at all, and there's not hardly any standing water in it, which is pretty surprising considering it's been raining really hard for several days. So that's another misconception, is that there's a lot of standing water and that that makes them dangerous. But that not true usually either.

Rain gardens are important for a couple reasons - one of the reasons is that they help filter pollutants out of the water such as fertilizers, sediment, dirt, all these things that can wash off of the road that's right in front of me into the Arboretum. So these get rid of those negative pollutants and help make the water cleaner. Rain gardens also help with that runoff problem by absorbing water. In our area, we have wastewater systems that are very, very old and they just can't handle all of the water that hits them after a really heavy rain event. If the wastewater systems become overwhelmed they actually can release raw sewage directly into our streams and rivers, which can have a variety of negative health consequences for both humans and the local ecosystems.

So behind me, again, we'll take a brief look at the Boone County Arboretum's ranked rain garden. You can come see it at any time, out here in Union, Kentucky. And hopefully here in the next few days we're gonna get some sun and a little less rain.