More about Rain Gardens

• Rain gardens are designed to drain quickly enough to avoid mosquitoes.  Rain gardens will drain within 24 hours (it takes at least 4 days for standing water to produce mosquitoes).

• Even when fully submerged, these systems will be shallow enough that they will not constitute a safety hazard. 

• Perennial plants are used that are accustomed to the local climate to allow minimal maintenance of the garden.  Like any garden, however, they require a fair amount of attention in the first year to establish the plants. 

 

Web Links

To find out much more about rain gardens (or bioretention cells, a more technical name for rain gardens) use the following links: 

http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org/links.htm - click on “Best Management Practices” then “Bioretention”.  This site has a long list of websites about the design and use of rain gardens with explanations of what you will find at each website.

10,000 Rain Gardens Website - This website outlines a program to enable the creation of rain gardens on a large scale in the Kansas City area.  Use this site to learn more about rain gardens, and how you could make a rain garden on your own.