Rain Gardens

Rain gardens are becoming increasingly popular in home landscapes. A rain garden is a natural or dug shallow depression designed to capture and soak up stormwater runoff from your roof or other impervious areas around your home like driveways, walkways, and even compacted lawn areas. The rain garden is planted with suitable trees, shrubs, flowers, and other plants allowing runoff to soak into the ground and protect water quality.

In addition to adding beauty to your home landscape, rain gardens can also help protect water quality by reducing stormwater runoff from your house lot. Stormwater runoff is considered one of the main sources of water pollution nationwide. A rain garden will allow the runoff generated on your property to infiltrate into the ground and help to reduce potential water quality problems. While your individual rain garden may seem like a small contribution, collectively, rain gardens can produce water quality benefits.

Benefits of Rain Gardens

In addition to reducing and filtering stormwater runoff and increasing groundwater recharge, rain gardens provide many other benefits. They:

• Provide an attractive and creative alternative to traditional lawn landscapes.
• Require less maintenance than lawns because they do not need to be mowed, fertilized, or watered once established.
• Increase property values with creative landscaping designs.
• Reduce storm drain overload and flooding if adopted on a community or neighborhood scale.

B & H Builders is dedicated to reducing the impact to the environment both during and after the construction phase. We installed our first rain garden in the Brown Deer subdivision in Coralville in 2008. The lawn is gently sloped to direct excess water to the rain garden catch basin. Rain water also enters the garden through roof downspouts.

Click here to view a slideshow of our Coralville Rain Garden