Rain Gardens:
Making Your Yard Work for the Watershed

What can homeowners do with the buckets of rain that pour down upon the Upstate every year? Build a rain garden!

A rain garden is simply a low area planted with water-loving perennials and bushes that allows stormwater to soak into the ground rather than rushing away through storm drains. Although they all share this common function of reducing the amount of stormwater and filtering any pollutants that might otherwise run off a property, rain gardens come in a variety of forms. Some rain gardeners direct gutters to their garden in order to collect the rain that lands on their roof. Other rain gardens are large but only slightly below the normal ground surface thus looking much like a typical garden bed. Some feature more wetland plants and are designed to handle relatively large quantities of water. Most rain gardens are filled with native plants and adequately mulched so that once they are established they require little maintenance other than the occasional weeding and watering during dry periods.

Although a relatively new concept in the Upstate, rain gardens have the potential to be highly successful in our climate. Precipitation falls fairly regularly throughout the year in our region. Compared to a place such as Denver with an average rainfall of 16 inches of rain a year, our average 50 inches of rain a year makes rain gardening a realistic landscaping alternative. We are rapidly losing the capacity to store and filter our rain water as fields and forests are converted to green lawns and parking lots throughout the Upstate. Not only are rain gardens an attractive addition to the landscape, they also reduce the amount of time and labor spent on the lawn while serving a vital role in reducing air and water pollution.

In October, Upstate Forever sponsored a Rain Garden field trip and workday to learn more about the benefits of rain gardening and to gain some hands-on experience constructing a demonstration rain garden in downtown Greenville.

Fifteen people participated in the 1.5 hour walk around the Pettigru Historic Neighborhood looking at water-friendly landscaping or how different types of landscaping could be improved to benefit water quality. Half of the participants then stayed to help construct one of the Upstate's few rain gardens at the Upstate Forever office in the Pettigru Historic Neighborhood.

Once the digging began, it took approximately five hours to complete the rain garden (seven volunteers worked for 2 hours and then 2 volunteers continued working for an additional 3 hours to complete it). You might be able to construct a rain garden in your own yard more quickly: the digging took considerable time in order to preserve many roots of a nearby mature tree while digging.

The material cost for completing the rain garden was just under $500, while a smaller rain garden could be constructed at a reduced cost, or you may have some of the materials available for free, such composted soil and rocks.

To get ideas about getting started, you can look at a simple brochure developed by the University of WIsconsin with useful information about rain gardens and easy instructions for building one at your own home or access a detailed 'how-to' manual for homeowners that covers rain garden sizing and siting, construction details and planting and maintenance - the manual includes 11 conceptual planting designs with plant species lists. For more information about rain gardens and how to build them, please visit our Rain Gardens & Constructed Wetlands section on the Reports and Resources Page.

To learn more about managing stormwater in our region, please visit the Stormwater Management & Erosion Control page on this website.