How to Build a Rain Garden

Rain gardens can help with the world's water crisis. We water gardeners and regular gardeners are trying to find every possible way to use and reuse water and still have a beautiful garden. One of those ways is to build a rain garden. Cities are doing it and so can home gardeners. With New Orleans just going through a water crisis of the greatest proportions, we are more concerned than ever with ways to recycle water, to keep it out of houses and streets. We as home gardeners can learn how to build rain or bog gardens to help recycle all our available water rather than wasting it.

Rain water is soft and clean
Many people remember when we caught rain in a barrel and used it to irrigate the gardens. My mother and grandmother used to catch it in tubs or buckets and use it to wash their hair. Our water was hard and the rain water was marvelously soft and made hair shine. The water was coveted.

Now that we are more "civilized," we allow that precious water to go right into the city sewers and on to the treatment centers where it is poisoned with chemicals. Then we buy it back to use in the house and water the garden and the cycle of water waste continues. We can bypass the journey through the sewers to the treatment plant by doing a few very simple things and, in the process, build a beautiful rain garden.

Collecting rain water
You can still collect the rain in barrels. In fact, you can buy barrels for just this purpose. You can use it to irrigate gardens, and that is the very simplest form of a rain garden. But how about this: Cut the downspouts about three feet off the ground and extend them away from the house about three feet. Dig a very shallow hole about 18 to 24 inches where the water spills out. Line the hole with bricks and add soil. Plant irises and dwarf Egyptian Cypress in it. You have a rain garden. Your rain garden will be dry most of the time, but you are now using that rain rather than letting it run into the sewer. At my house, I just removed the sod and planted bog plants. We are close enough to the water table to not need a brick liner or more soil. Our water is just under the surface.

Building an aqueduct
If you wish, build a brick aqueduct from where the water spills out to a spot in your garden where you want irrigation. Fill the brick aqueduct with round pebbles and put some plants in there that like wet feet. If you have a pond, run your aqueduct near your pond and you have fooled your eyes into thinking your pond is larger. You also have created a wonderful open water system.

You can plant bog plants in or near your aqueduct to make your illusion complete.

When not much rain has fallen, the water will be absorbed into the ground. When we have what we call a gully washer and the ground becomes saturated, the water moves forward in the aqueducts. The water is now clean and filtered and can drain into your pond or into a bog garden you have constructed near your pond. Put more water-loving plants in and you are giving the water more filtration. These rain gardens will not attract mosquitoes because the water does not stand stagnant.

There are as many types of rain gardens as your imagination allows you to think of. Just use your rain water, whether you collect in buckets, in a barrel attached to your downspouts, into a bog garden near your down spouts or through easily made aqueducts throughout your yard.

There is one caveat: If you have poor drainage to start with, a rain garden will not solve that problem. You will still have poor drainage, but you can build a bog garden where your lowest garden spots are and use that water rather than letting it stand.

When you build your rain garden, use plants that love wet feet. Deep-rooted native plants do best.