The King's Daughters Inn 3 Year Old Rain Garden

The Maturing Rain Garden

It hardly seems that only three years ago there was a gaping hole in the front yard of the Inn.  A picture from my Rain Garden Handbook shows one gallon plants in plastic pots sitting atop the soil mix, ready to be planted.  Now, we enjoy the seasonal colors of blue indigo, hosta, siberian iris and especially the fantastic show of late summer grasses in bloom.

Our job now with this rain garden?  Keep windblown weed seeds from establishing and choking out our intended plant mix, and one unexpected mutation of a variegated hybrid reverting back to it's plain leaf form and spreading like crazy.  But Mother Nature is full of surprises so we dutifully get on hands and knees and dig roots of the unwanted invader.  

Beyond those small maintenance tasks, we can take pad and pencil and multiply the number of inches of rain by the capacity of our rain garden.  We humbly congratulate ourselves on the fact that in it's three year existence, this garden has diverted nearly 920,000 gallons of rain water from the overburdened storm water system of our City of Durham.  

Downtown areas with their large expanses of impervious surfaces create huge volumes of storm water runoff.  For us in Durham, this runoff is dumped mainly into a tributary of the Ellerbe Creek.  The Inn's location adjacent to downtown helps mitigate part of the volume of water from storm events.  

Thank you Colin and Deanna Crossman for the foresight and commitment to be a pioneer in new storm water management practices.