Illustration of how a rain garden works, from the Natural Resources Conservation services. Click on the picture to go to their website.
Rain gardens are a pretty new idea – they started in the late 1980s, when the Maryland Environmental Protective Department decided to set up a rain garden to capture the overflow of rain water that came off a parking lot. The University of Maryland then started researching this idea, and Michigan and Wisconsin became big leaders in developing the rain garden idea.
The genius of rain gardens is that they are not just helping with infiltration and being a small part of the flow of water, instead, rain gardens are set up to actually stop the flow of water…they’re the last step before rainwater seeps into the ground.
Minnesota Rain Gardens
1223 Dayton Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55104
651-260-7885
minnesotaraingardens@gmail.com
