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Artful Living: Practical tips for navigating waterlogged gardens

Linda Brazill  —  8/22/2008 2:07 pm

It takes a lot to lure me from my garden in the spring, but a family wedding and an 80th birthday celebration found me on the road the first two weeks in June. House and garden being well looked after, my only concern was that I'd miss the peonies' annual blooming.

It appears I should have been more worried about the garden washing away.

Bookstores and libraries stock hundreds of volumes that tell you how to do almost anything you can think of connected with gardening -- except how to deal with extreme weather. This past winter local gardens were subjected to damage from salt and more than 100 inches of snow. Now, in the first half of June, we've been deluged with more than five times the normal rainfall for the entire month, with the runoff pushing the lakes to the breaking point.

How to deal with such conditions is something each gardener has to figure out alone. There are, however, some things that can help you and your garden get through torrential rainstorms.

It's a rare landscape that's perfectly flat; that means the rainwater hitting your garden wants to collect in depressions and run down slopes. A walk around your property should reveal what happened in your particular plot after recent rains -- where the water went, or didn't go -- so you should be able to pinpoint problems and start to fix them.

Easy and short-term solutions: Be sure your gutters are clear when a big storm is forecast. Also know where the nearest storm sewer is located and make sure the opening is free of debris so water flowing away from your property has somewhere to go.

Most water concerns, however, require thought and long-term solutions. Among the most important is to decrease the amount of impermeable surfaces, those that don't let water drain through. For most folks, that's the roof and driveway of your home. Consider replacing concrete driveways with cement pavers that allow grass or groundcovers like creeping thyme to grow through them and water to flow through them.

If you're designing a large patio area, rather than cementing bricks or stone pavers permanently in place, set them in gravel or sand which will allow water to drain away freely. Add a "French drain," which is nothing more than a buried tube or ditch filled with stones and gravel that directs water away from an area, usually the foundation of the house.

Gutters also direct water away from the roof, but the downspout can easily send a torrent of water washing away whatever it comes in contact with, from bare dirt to gravel paths. The latter is the current problem I'm trying to solve in my garden. One option is to use cement "spreaders" at the downspout's end to direct the water in a wider area. Another is to bury the downspout -- topped with a pop-up release -- a short distance away in a grassy spot that can more easily accommodate the extra water.

Or attach the downspout to rain barrels so you can collect the water for later use. Our neighbor, who's a longtime gardener with a huge vegetable plot and lots of perennial borders, has three rain barrels attached to his garden shed and four to the gutters on his house. Not only do they help when it rains too much, they help to water the garden when the rain disappears. See www.rainfordane.com for more information.

We've also dug channels -- dry streams -- into our garden in the areas where drainage and standing water have been problems. They're like a French drain with lots of rocks and gravel, but visibly incorporated into our design rather than being disguised. One in particular carries water that overflows from our pond away from the house. We've put a bridge across it and lined its banks with irises.

If your property isn't flat, take a cue from farmers when designing a garden, and use terracing and contour planting to control erosion on slopes. Our next-door neighbor's vegetable garden is slightly elevated above the rest of his backyard like a giant raised bed. And the paths between are heavily mulched with leaves that they gather up and shred each fall.

You can also turn low spots into rain gardens that temporarily collect rainwater from your property's impervious surfaces, including a heavily compacted lawn. Home rain gardens can be shallow -- just deep enough to hold water so it can slowly sink into the ground. Fill them with plants that can take a periodic soaking.

In 2005, multiple rain gardens were constructed along Adams Street in the Monroe Street/Henry Vilas Zoo vicinity. More than 3,300 plants were installed in nine rain gardens the following spring. Homeowner Mary Jo Tierney told me the residents got to choose the plants they wanted, requesting a particular color palette or bloom sequence, or, like Tierney, "all willy-nilly."

The city is tracking and mapping citizen rain gardens in its 1,000 Rain Gardens initiative on its Web site. The Lake Wingra watershedhas the largest percentage of rain gardens (34 percent) per local lake watershed. Sue Ellingson, a native plant devotee, has published lots of people-friendly information, including her "Rules for Rain Gardens," on her Web site, sueellingson.com/raingardens.

Linda Brazill  —  8/22/2008 2:07 pm