Rain Garden

Last week, during a torrential rain, our basement studio was flooded. This would have been only mildly annoying if the studio were empty. Alas, Susan and Pony, a visiting Chinese scholar to the landscape architecture department and her daughter live there now. We moved all of their things off the ground, and invited them to stay in our guest room that night. The following morning, we got all the water out, and begun trying to conceive of a permanent solution to the problem. The water got in where the wall meets the floor; it was clearly groundwater that we were fighting. So, how do you lower the water table under your house???

Lucky me, I am married to a brilliant landscape architect who specializes in stormwater management. After assessing the bigger picture, HD noticed that our front yard receives a large amount of water from up the street. He decided to perforate the concrete stormwater pipe in the lowest point of the edge of our drive; this is where the water turns from the street and into our yard. So the perforated pipe is covered with a layer of gravel and a bit of top soil stabilized with the plants you see before you. This will hopefully divert enough water into the stormwater pipe to not raise the ground water table in our yard high enough to flood the basement...

Only time will tell whether this solution is enough; if it is not, we are looking at a major expense to fix it where it happens, right around the perimeter of the house...

So, here is our new rain garden. I helped a bit, but my bossy husband insisted on doing most of the work himself. :-)

Here comes rain the again...