The rise of rain gardens

It isn't often that a fad turns out to be something that benefits society long-term.

Piercings? No. Sport utility vehicles? Hardly. Designer coffees? Debatable.

But rain gardens might be different -- beds of native grasses and wildflowers that gardeners and conservationists are planting near downspouts, sump pump outlets and paved areas to absorb and clean polluted storm water run-off.

"We are trying to catch this as a fad now and transform it into a gardening standard," said Sue Cubberly, president of The Rain Garden Network, a Chicago-based consulting firm that designs, plans and installs rain gardens. "We hope this eventually just becomes the way things are done."

Cubberly says rain gardens have been hot in the Chicago area for about two years.

"People have been realizing that they can plant a very attractive, easy-to-maintain garden which is virtually self-watering and, at the same time, reduce their contribution to the polluted storm water problem," she said.

Individuals, corporations and even governments have been joining the movement.

Cubberly has been working on large projects for the villages of Kenilworth and Park Forest. Winfield United, a citizen action group in DuPage County, recently won a state grant to install a rain garden at Winfield Middle School.

A professional conservationist in Schaumburg recently volunteered to plant a large rain garden for his condominium association.

The rain garden concept was developed in the early 1990s by a Maryland county seeking an ideal storm water management system for median strips, parking lot islands and swales.

After several years they invented a "bioretention" system that temporarily stored runoff and cleansed it of hydrocarbons, oil, heavy metals, phosphorus, fertilizers and other pollutants that would otherwise drain into storm sewers and eventually discharge into streams, rivers and lakes.

Once the idea was proven, it was given the much more marketable name of "rain garden" and word spread.

One of the first people in Illinois to hear about them was Mike Sands, the environmental team leader for Prairie Holdings Corp. at the Prairie Crossing subdivision in Grayslake, a large community of homes and condominiums.

"It was my job back in 1996 and 1997 to find ways to improve our environmental performance at Prairie Crossing," Sands said.

"Since storm water is an incredibly important issue for this part of Illinois, I was naturally interested," he said.

Sands said he wanted to clean the storm water and hold it on site for as long as possible to prevent contamination of lakes and streams.

"The trick was to make these water retention and cleansing areas into amenities instead of mud puddles," Sands said. "Rain gardens were the perfect solution."

He developed rain gardens near the models, in cul-de-sac islands and in new homeowners' private yards, including his own.

Today, 10 years later, 10 to 15 percent of Prairie Crossing's site qualifies as rain garden. They are working well, he says.

"I discovered that, just like any landscaping, if you take reasonable care of a rain garden, it is gorgeous," he said.

Sands said rain gardens are easier to manage than the typical flower bed, even with having to cut them back or burn them once a year.

This spring citizens and students in west suburban Winfield transformed a barren area outside Winfield Middle School into a rain/prairie garden.

They wanted to plant an attractive, natural garden that would also help cleanse runoff from the building and parking lot, and get the students interested in the natural sciences, said Karen Skillman.

"We selected plants that like seasonal moisture, but don't necessarily need it and dug kind of a mini-river with tributaries branching out from it in order to channel the water and distribute it through the garden," she said.

About the same time, Dennis Paige was single-handedly building his 10th rain garden at his Town Square condominium association in Schaumburg.

A conservationist at nearby Spring Valley Nature Center, Paige has been working for more than a decade to transform the generic landscaping around his association's two buildings into native landscaping.

His efforts have earned him recognition from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and a small grant from the North Cook County Soil and Water Conservation District.

This spring he developed a rain garden on 1,000 square feet along a swale leading away from one of the buildings. Paige predicts that in two years it will be beautiful.

"I am trying to do something that will help fight global warming and storm water runoff, while also providing my neighbors with a symphony of natural change with the seasons," Paige said.

"The community has really accepted it now, but it has taken time for them to understand what I am trying to do," he said.

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There is no such thing as a standard rain garden.

"People have different aesthetic goals and that is the beauty of it," Sands said. "Some want gardens like mine, with ponds. Others want no standing water. You can come up with any number of different designs, depending upon what works on an individual site."

Cubberly said the important thing is to make sure the area is correctly prepared -- digging deep enough and in the right area; layering in sand, topsoil and compost; and planting native species that are "used to taking care of themselves."

In this area that means prairie grasses and wildflowers like wild irises, swamp milkweed, ironweed, cardinal flower, marsh phlox and sedges.

"Rain gardens work fairly well in most areas of the country except for the middle South ranging from Louisiana to Tennessee," Cubberly said.

"They don't work in those areas because the water table is too close to the surface there."