Rain Gardens of West Michigan

Saving the Great Lakes, One Garden at a Time

What is a Rain Garden?

A rain garden is an attractive garden with a special purpose; to reduce the amount of stormwater entering our beautiful Great Lakes.

A rain garden is constructed as a place to direct the rain from your roof or driveway, and is landscaped with perennial plant species native to our region. Rain gardens have loose, absorbent soils; a shallow, bowl-shaped ponding area; and are made to resemble the function of a natural meadow or light forest ecosystem.

Planting a rain garden may seem like a small thing, but if you calculate the amount of rain that runs off your roof, you would be very surprised. During a typical moderate storm of 1” of rain during a 24 hour period, over 700 gallons of water will run off the average roof, an impervious area of about 1,200 square feet. In one rainy day, your roof runoff could fill up fourteen bathtubs! Add up the many roofs in your city and we’re talking a lot of water. 

That rain is supposed to soak into the ground, but instead heads down the street to the storm drain, carrying pollution with it. Keeping rain where it falls, by putting it into a beautiful rain garden, is a natural solution.

The First Rain Gardens

The first rain gardens were our native ecosystems. Before our lands  were settled, rain was filtered through soils, roots, and plants in our native forests, wetlands, and meadows. Most of the water that entered our surface waters was cool, clean groundwater. Our wealth of streams, rivers and lakes was naturally clean.

When European settlers cleared the land and built communities, the natural water-cleaning systems were removed. Our streams and rivers became more and more degraded as water ran off the land instead of being taken up by plants, soaking into the soil, and filtered by soils and wetlands. Rain gardens were invented as a way of imitating the function of these natural filtering systems that development removed.

Added Benefits of Rain Gardens

Rain gardens are lovely landscaping features.

Rain garden plants create wildlife habitats and attract butterflies, birds, and other wildlife.

Rain gardens can save you money. They don’t need to be fertilized or sprayed, only weeded and mulched. They reduce the amount of lawn you have to maintain. This makes your yard a healthier place for children and pets.

Rain gardens can potentially absorb hundreds of gallons of rain that would otherwise wash pollution down the street and into the nearest river, stream, or lake. Even small rain gardens can absorb a lot of rain. \

Rain gardens can actually remove many of the common pollutants in stormwater.

Rain gardens are low maintence. Once established, they require no fertilizer, watering, or mowing. A once a year cleanup, addition of shredded hardwood mulch to keep the surface moist and tidy, and removal of weeds and invasive species are all that are required.

Rain gardens can be an integral part of our stormwater management and environmental approach. Their use doesn’t involve a lot of centralized planning. They don’t require much space, can be fitted into oddball shapes, and can be readily added to existing buildings. They look nice, and you don’t need to be an engineer to build one. Anyone can make a rain garden—including you!

Instructions for choosing a proper site and design, preparing the soil, selecting native plants and maintaining a Rain Garden may be found at www.raingardens.org or by contacting Rain Gardens of West Michigan, West Michigan Environmental Action Council in Grand Rapids; (616) 454-RAIN. Workshops on creating rain gardens are held regularly throughout West Michigan. Visit the website for dates and times.

Excerpted from www.raingardens.org and WMEAC brochure on Rain Gardens.