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Should Pasadena require rain gardens as mitigation for drought landscaping?

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 29, 2009 at 4:04 pm

From the Pasadena SubRosa blog:

Rain gardens provide one way to counter the unintended negative effects of water conservation on the groundwater table and local ecology. A rain garden captures rainwater from roofs and diverts the water from a gutter downspout into a two-layered bed of soil with a sublayer of sand and gravel and a top layer of plants or vegetables. Rain gardens are designed to be esthetically pleasing and enhancing to urban property values and are relatively inexpensive.

Rain gardens only have to be about 10% of the hard surface area of a property to be effective according to civil engineers Kenneth Potter and Alejandro Dussaillant of the University of Wisconsin. What is counterintuitive is that smaller rain gardens are more effective than larger rain gardens. Borrowing from nature, watering a large surface such as your lawn results in rapid evaporation and absorption by plants and less net recharge to the water table. Urban rain gardens function much as do dry streambeds and prairie potholes in recharging the groundwater.

Read more from the Pasadena SubRosa blog by clicking here.

June 29, 2009 · Filed Under Conservation

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