Verdant Design

We have taken the images over the last year to show how the rain garden changes through the seasons. The functions of filtering and infiltrating water does change seasonally, but the volume of the depression does help even in the warming and thawing through the winter. The native plants that are used also provide a strong root system in every season. This is why they are so important to create a long-lasting rain garden. This is starting the fourth year of this rain garden!

The incredible rains this year have kept the rain garden going strong. The Lobelia cardinalis (Cardinal Flower) is just beginning to bloom. There are still a few Wood Poppy blooms, but not as many as earlier in the season. The sedges and the Northern Wild Oats are just beginning to set seed. It all adds up to many plants changing the rain garden into a wonderful space.

The view out the window in May is always verdant and lush. The Wood Poppy is now setting seed while the Cardinal Flower is getting bigger. Even with all of the rain, the water is infiltrating, watering the plants, and not causing runoff/flooding.

Celandine Poppy or Wood Poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) is a wonderful woodland plant that doesn’t require any special effort to grow.  In fact it grows in shade to part-sun, reproduces easily, and only gets to about 18″ in height.  On top of that, it is a plant that consistently blooms around Derby.  It is native to the Ohio Valley, so it is perfectly adjusted to our climate and soils.

One of the real benefits of a rain garden is water infiltration. When rain water enters the soil it does a lot of good locally as well as decreasing the amount of runoff (and therefore flooding). So what kind of infiltration can be expected? April 5th’s evening storm was a good example. We had roughly 0.38 inches of rain in about ten minutes according to the nearby MSD rain gauge. Here are a series of photos with the first one taken during the rain storm with water running into the micro-basin, the second just as it was ending with water being retained and the third ten minutes after it ended with the water fully infiltrated into the ground.