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Go with the Flow

Most of us think of our yards and flower beds as places to grow plants or to soothe our gardening souls. What if we designed our landscapes based on their ability to collect, filter, and recycle rain water?

"The movement of water through a landscape can be what drives the entire design concept for a yard," says April Maly, a landscape architect with Anne Penniman Associates (APA) in Essex. "A garden can be so much more than foundation plants and mulched beds. A lot of our clients love the New England landscape, the trees, the rocks, the woods, the water, so we bring those principles into their home landscape."

Examples of this holistic approach by Anne Lacouture Penniman, the landscape architect, and George Penniman, her husband, the architect, are found along the Connecticut and Rhode Island shorelines. APA designed the 42-acre Salt Meadow Park in Madison on the abandoned coastal airport site, including habitat restoration, pedestrian paths, and a kayak launch.

On a much more intimate scale, Penniman designed landscaping around cottages at Essex Meadows Lifecare Retirement Community. She utilized the exposed ledge and steep slopes of the former blast site to create a series of interesting small garden spaces. Native plants were selected to attract birds and wildlife and provide for four seasons of interest, while needing less watering and maintenance.

When it comes to water, Connecticut residents aren't faced with California-style water rationing and xeriscaping (landscaping and gardening that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental water from irrigation). But we have our own water issues. What we do with it in our yards affects our streams, rivers, and Long Island Sound? What goes on the ground ends up in the Sound.

Yards and driveways should be designed to pitch water away from houses and buildings - no one wants a soggy basement. But instead of channeling the water out to the street and into the storm sewer as quickly as possible, we should look for ways to get it back into the ground, says Kendall Barbery, green infrastructure program manager for Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE) and its bi-state program Save the Sound.

Fast-running rainwater picks up pollutants as it goes, whether it's road salt and grease, or pesticides and fertilizers we apply to our lawns. The problem is compounded when older sewer systems combine both the storm water and town sewer pipes, which overflow in heavy rains and floods.

CFE's Green Project Team works with municipal engineers in New Haven, Hartford, and Bridgeport to reduce storm water runoff from municipal right-of-ways, including sidewalks, roads, and parking lots. Gray infrastructure refers to pipes and utilities, usually underground. Green infrastructure includes plants and technologies that mimic natural hydrologic cycles that we're disrupted with all of our impervious surfaces - roads, sidewalks, buildings, parking lots.

"We're capturing water that is picking up pollutants off of the roadways in urban settings, with pervious surfaces and high volumes of storm water," says Barbery, "But the same principals apply to residential neighborhoods."

CFE's reducerunoff.org website explains how changes to grey and green infrastructure can reduce the volume of storm water and the amount of pollutants going into our waterways. It has examples of bioswales installed with the City of New Haven and the Urban Resources Initiative.

"Bioswales are like rain gardens on steroids," says Barbery, "When we're working in urban spaces, with higher volumes of water and tighter spaces, there is a lot of water to divert, especially near sidewalks, roads, parking lots."

Rain gardens are specially-designed depressions in the landscape that capture water, hold it and allow it to infiltrate into the ground. They can be planted with a variety of trees, shrubs, grasses and perennials that adapt well to both wet and dry conditions.

Bioswales add water-holding reservoirs underground, which requires more excavating and more drainage materials. In both cases, plants and mulching materials, often pebbles and stones, are part of the filtration. The plants and garden space provide habitat and food for birds and pollinators.

"A lot of little projects to slow down storm water runoff and let rain infiltrate into the ground can make a difference," says Maly, who recently helped clients in New Haven resolve a drainage problem and achieve an environmentally sustainable urban garden in a small space.

The new owners of an old home on a small city lot discovered the leader pipes on their house gutters were diverting the water into old pipes in the basement. It was a flooding problem just waiting to happen. They also wanted more birds and butterflies but had no desire for a grass lawn in their small space. The solution was to install underground water tanks that captured and slowly released the water and to put in some native planting beds.

Many of the design elements Maly suggests for residential landscapes have ancient roots. Persian and Moorish Spanish gardens were graced with runnels (rocked channels or streamlets) and rills (stone-lined canals) as far back as 4000 BC. Before there were enclosed downspouts, rain chains channeled rainwater off of structures. Today's plastic rain barrels often are designed to look like their ancient clay predecessors that were serious water storage containers.

"You can have a series of rain gardens draining through a stretch of yard, switch from rain gutters to rain chains, put sculptures in a rain garden and use pebbles for ground cover instead of mulch," she says. "It could be a very poetic landscape."

Of course, native plants are the natural choice for these landscapes. These plant species, in turn, attract and provide food and shelter for native birds and pollinators.

Another approach is to grow more plants in your flower beds and spend less time and money on mulch every year. Instead, fill them up with native plants, let these grow and reseed so there is less exposed space for weed seeds to take over.

If rain gardens, bioswales or riparian buffers sound intimidating for your own back yard, Barbery says to start with a few simple stormwater-friendly changes.

"If nothing else, plant a tree," she says. "Tree canopies intercept rain as it falls, and tree roots soak up quite a bit of water."

Plant trees strategically located so down spouts can be directed toward them instead of toward the street or pervious driveways. One or more trees can be the focal point of a rain garden.

Need advice on how to create a rain garden and trees and shrubs to plant? See UConn's NEMO website and download UConn's free Rain Garden app, at memo.uconn.edu. NEMO stands for Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials.