Is a Rain Garden for You?
Afia's Rain Garden
Mariposa Naturescapes can assist you in determining if a rain garden or other stormwater management strategies are appropriate for your landscape. Then, we can move forward with design, installation, and maintenance.
Rain gardens work like a native forest by capturing and filtering polluted runoff from rooftops, driveways, and other hard surfaces. Rain gardens are a smart and proven way of using beautiful landscaping, with many of our native plants, to: clean our waterways, protect our precious natural habitats, improve homes and neighborhoods, limit flooding, and save millions of dollars in pollution clean-up and expensive stormwater projects.
You may qualify for the financial incentives that the City of Seattle has initiated through its Rain Wise program to home owners in certain neighborhoods to create rain gardens and install cisterns to reduce stormwater runoff. Homeowners can get $4 per square foot of roof area served by a rain garden and/or cistern system. To qualify, you must be redirecting 400 square feet or more of roof space, be within the qualifying neighborhoods, and have rain garden or cistern installed by a certified contractor (Mariposa Naturescapes is one of them).
Check out the ten easy steps to start a Rain Wise Project.
Getting the slope just right in
Rosemary's Rain Garden
If you're interested in learning more or when/if you have a rain garden, you can join Stewardship Partners & Washington State University Extension's 12,000 Rain Garden Campaign, in cooperation with local partners, targeting rain gardens to address significant problems on priority streams and marine shorelines caused by untreated, uncontrolled runoff. Find out how you can help expand rain gardens across the Puget Sound area and be part of the solution for a healthy Puget Sound - 12,000 rain gardens in Seattle/Puget Sound by 2016! These 12,000 rain gardens can soak up 160 million gallons of polluted runoff to protect our waterways.
If you have a rain garden, register it!
Get more Rain Garden information on our Resources page. For example (pictured), one of the most comprehensive rain garden resources is the Rain Garden Handbook for Western Washington Homeowners by Washington State University (2007, currently working a revised edition).
©Mariposa Naturescapes, Kimberly Leeper | email: kimberly@mariposanaturescapes.com | phone 206-419-1836