REPOST: Water works: rain gardens are a beautiful way to fight street flooding
Rain gardens can be the perfect landscaping solution for flood-prone areas. Aside from creating a beautiful panorama, they can direct stormwater from roofs and other water-resistant surfaces into plant-filled low areas and back to the ground. Read more of these innovative landscaping features below.Â
Joe Evans and Barney Lighter of Evans Lighter Landscape Architecture and Ramiro Diaz, an urban planner and designer at Waggonner & Ball Architects, have designed a courtyard rain garden designed to manage storm water runoff, featuring a small reflecting pool, cistern planters and wetlands landscaping. One of the two Diaz family dogs, Giussi, enjoys drink from the pools.
Image Source: nola.com
John P. Klingman has become accustomed to living on a street that floods. During the summer, stormwater can rise on the road in front of his Garden District home as often as once a week. Getting up to move his car in the middle of the night is particularly irritating.
Rather than just grouse about the flooding, though, Klingman decided to turn his Harmony Street yard into a beachhead in the war against stormwater runoff.
In other words, he installed a rain garden.
The yard is a picturesque landscape, with a frog pond rimmed in Louisiana irises. Water grasses and ferns fill in the shallow, shady spaces on the side of his 1898 home, and rice paper plants (Tetrapanax papyrifer) create a leafy threshold between the frog pond and the front garden.
The landscape's key attraction, though, is primarily below ground: a 19th-century, brick-lined cistern Klingman found buried in the yard and had excavated by Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture, which also designed the rain garden.
At least 6 feet deep and about 6 feet across at its underground base, the cistern's circular rim sits just below the iris beds at the corner of the pond. A bubbling fountain creates a focal point in the center.
When the rain comes now, water flows from the gently sloping iris beds into the cistern.
"However many gallons of water that cistern holds is that many gallons not running out into the street," said Klingman, a Tulane University architecture professor whose work focuses on architectural design and "water engagement."
"If more people started holding stormwater in places that are OK on their property, the city would be safer (from flooding)," he said. "And one of those places that's OK is in the garden."
While Klingman's garden hasn't saved his street from flooding, he believes it's making a small dent.
Even better, when the rain stops, the water in the cavernous cistern slowly seeps out into the surrounding soil. The cistern's water level drops about two feet a day, he said.
Rain gardens like Klingman's are more than just pretty landscapes. They're designed to direct stormwater running off of roofs, concrete and other impervious surfaces into shallow, plant-filled low areas, reducing the amount of water -- and pollutants -- that funnels into the city's drains.
"Rain gardens allow water to percolate back into the ground, recharging the water table," according to "The Joy of Water," a soft-copy illustrated book that explains in easy steps how homeowners can better manage their properties' drainage. "By allowing water to flow through layers of porous, permeable material -- such as sand, gravel and soil -- pollutants, heavy metals, oil and grease are filtered out." (The "Joy of Water" was produced by Global Green USA, Water Works, Dana Brown & Associates and Longvue House & Gardens. To request a copy, call Global Green at 504.525.2121).Â
Such "green infrastructure" will be the focus of Green Keepers, a new educational series beginning Tuesday, hosted by Parkway Partners and funded by a grant from the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board. Classes will teach New Orleans residents ways they can make a difference in the fight against flooding in a city that sees an average annual rainfall of 62 inches.
The series will cover topics such as vertical and rooftop gardens; small- and large-scale water catchments; bioswales and rain gardens; plants for green infrastructure; concrete and permeability. The program includes field trips to see the infrastructure in action. (To register for the classes, go to parkwaypartnersnola.org.)
Joe Evans III, horticulturist and permaculturist with Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture, will lead two of the lectures.
The concept of catching rainwater and holding it on your property may seem counterintuitive: Wouldn't you want floodwater to stay as far away from your home as possible?
"The idea is to control where the water goes instead of just letting it go into the street or into your house," said Klingman, who discovered his underground cistern when he was digging around in his yard not long after he moved into his house in 1990.
The cistern was buried when he found it. Evans cleared the structure, jumping inside as he removed decades' worth of mud and debris.
Klingman isn't sure of the cistern's original purpose. It may have been used to collect rainwater; in the 19th century, cisterns were common in New Orleans, he said, though many were above ground.
After Hurricane Katrina, Klingman said his eyes were opened to the ways in which water can be an asset rather than a problem. He met Dutch water management experts while they were working with New Orleans-based Waggonner & Ball Architects and other locals in developing the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan.
"The Dutch view water as a positive," he said.
Local soils shrink and swell with groundwater fluctuations, so drying out the soil can contribute to subsidence, a serious problem in south Louisiana.
"Stormwater pipes and canals continually drain groundwater from the soil," architect Ramiro Diaz said last week in an emailed response to the question: Why should the average homeowner care about stormwater management? Diaz, who works with Waggonner & Ball, recently installed a rain garden at his own home in the Garden District.
As groundwater is removed, soil contracts and "organic matter oxidizes, resulting in subsidence," Diaz said. "Both of these processes result in damage to our streets and over time to building foundations and pilings."
Diaz and his wife live in a circa 1840s brick property on St. Mary Street. Living quarters are upstairs, commercial spaces are downstairs and a courtyard is in back.Â
Before the rain garden was installed this summer, "the whole courtyard would fill up in a storm," Diaz said.
Working with Evans and landscape architect Barney Lighter, they came up with a sharp-angled, eye-catching approach to rainwater management: a cascading landscape with swimming-pool-sized steel cisterns filled with floating marsh (made of driftwood,equisetum, three-square bulrush plants, cattails and mosquito-eating fish).
The cisterns catch rainwater and filter it into an oyster-shell bed and then into a low wetlands garden with a reflecting pool. Like sand through an hour glass, water slowly moves through the graduated system.
The cisterns sit on a raised Bermuda turf bed, which also soaks up water, while the wetlands garden is filled with "thirsty plants," such as small cypress trees, swamp sunflowers, palmetto palms and Gulf muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris).
"This yard will (intercept) 5,000 gallons of stormwater," Evans said. The buildings' downspouts will eventually be funneled into the cisterns as well.
Diaz got to see the system in action during a hard downpour last weekend, describing the storm as "incredible." Â
"Even without the downspouts connected to the system, I got a preview of how the rain garden will work. It had about 3 or 4 inches of water ... Looked absolutely beautiful. The water infiltrated very quickly after the rain passed."
Perched on the edge of the reflecting pool, watching over the landscape, is a statue of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, art and music. She was a recent find, Diaz said.
"She's always associated with flowing water," he said, "so she was perfect."
Desert Springs Pools and Spas provides swimming pool construction and landscaping services in Las Vegas Valley. View its landscaping designs on this website.
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