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There have been a great many exciting rain
garden and LID projects brought to beautiful completion in our region.
This page will hopefully provide a virtual launching point to visit some
of these sites. In the future, we hope to provide case studies,
budgets, and abundant photos, plans, and plant lists. Where
possible, we also want to provide maps and directions to help you plan a
tour of rain garden sites which are open to the public.
If you have a site which you would like to
promote or recommend, please feel free to
contact us.
Forest Park Rain Garden
Friends of Sligo Creek has joined
forces with the city of Takoma Park to implement and showcase Low Impact
Development (LID) practices on city-owned property. LID stormwater
management techniques use methods that mimic natural processes to filter
and retain stormwater runoff. The first project was the November 2005
installation of a rain garden at Forest Park located at the corner of
Prince George Ave and Elm Ave. The lower end of the park was experiencing
serious problems with erosion due to excessive stormwater runoff from
impervious play surfaces in the park. The new rain gardens are designed to
improve or even eliminate the erosion problems at the park while
protecting our streams. For more information about this project, click on
the link above. To get a better view of the garden, click on the
image showing
Ann Hoffnar hard at work maintaining the site.
Fletcher's Service
Center
Olney, Maryland
 Staff
from the Department of Environmental Protection and Fletcher's Service
Center on worked during the spring of 2005 to plan and plant a rain garden
to treat and manage stormwater on what had been a relatively unused piece
of land adjacent to a convenience store for customers at the service
station and car wash. Bobby Fletcher, owner of the service station,
was interested in providing a comfortable picnic area for customers, and
the rain garden would help create a pleasant natural setting, while also
serving Mr. Fletcher's ongoing commitment to water quality and
environmental protection as one of Montgomery County's
Environmental Partners. This page is undergoing construction,
but already shows vivid before and after improvement at the site.
Eastern Middle School
Dedicated members of the Friends of Sligo Creek
and the Neighbors of Northwest
Branch
are working to help the creek by implementing Environmentally Beneficial
Landscaping on their property, schoolyards, church grounds, etc.
Environmentally Beneficial Landscaping is a form of Low Impact Development
(LID). LID uses a wide array of innovative methods to retain, detain,
filter, and recharge near the stormwater source. Instead of a large
expensive centralized system, stormwater passes through numerous
small-scale decentralized controls. The goal of LID is to restore
important ecological functions in a watershed, such as hydrologic regime,
while reducing stormwater runoff. Click above or on the image to
link to the Friends of Sligo Creek
webpage exploring this dynamic project.
American Elm Park
In an earlier project, the Friends of
Sligo Creek, along with the neighborhood Civic Associations,
agreed to co-sponsor a Montgomery County Department of Environmental
Protection (DEP) Rainscapes project at the site on Oct 13th, 2003. The
project consisted on installing a rain garden on the upper portion of the
park. DEP helped with know-how and plant material, and three members of
the department came to help on the day the garden was built; funding was
provided by the Chesapeake
Bay Trust. Dozens of members of the community also came out to help
build the rain garden. The rain garden will immediately benefit that part
of the Sligo Creek watershed as well as educate homeowners about
stormwater run-off. The site will serve as a pilot demonstration project
that will be monitored by the community. Be sure to also see:
Photos from
the October 13th workday event and
"How to Build a Rain
Garden," a photo essay prepared using photos and experiences learned
from this project.
Monarda and
asters and monarchs, oh my!
Be sure to visit FOSC's extraordinary (and wonderfully colorful)
Action Log
for this site for October 2005.
White Oak Library
Pictured to the right are two tree box filters that were installed at
the White Oak Library. The two
boxes capture approximately one acre of the main parking lot area. The
boxes work by filtering the first flush off the parking lot through a
well drained soil. Once the filters reach full capacity during large
storms the water utilizes the conventional inlet located adjacent to
the boxes. According to University of Virginia research, the tree
boxes should remove approximately 85% TSS, 74% total phosphorous, 69%
total nitrogen, and 82% metals (copper). The tree box supplier
provides a two warranty and maintenance program for each box. The
manufacture will replace any dead plant material, remove trash and
sediment and replenish mulch during that period. Overall, installation
involved approximately a week and had limited impacts to the numerous
utility constraints that we faced at this site. |
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