Rain Garden Street Demonstration
The Friends of Lake Wingra began exploring the idea of a rain garden street in the spring of 2003. This summer the project will move off the drawing board and become a reality on the 1900, 2000, and 2100 blocks of Adams St.
What is it?
A rain garden is a simply garden in a shallow depression. Rainwater, typically from a roof downspout, soaks into the garden soil and gets cleaned in the process.
In a rain garden street, rain gardens are dug in the terrace, between the street and the sidewalk. The gardens capture runoff, not from roofs, but from the street. Street runoff dumps a lot of dirt and excess nutrients into Lake Wingra and many other lakes and rivers. (Storm sewers are simply concrete pipes; water in them isn’t cleaned in any way.)
Making a dent in street runoff with something as low tech as a garden is an idea with remarkable potential. A rain garden is a green machine that’s cheap and effective. The tough question is how to create gardens that look good and are easy to maintain. With this project, we hope to find some answers.
FOLW Partners with City of Madison
FOLW wrote a grant to fund the Rain Garden Street. The money was awarded to the City of Madison, which has engineered the project and hired landscape designers Margaret Burlingham and Hope Oostdik. Neighbors on Adams St. have met individually with Margaret and Hope to design gardens that suit them.
The gardens will be dug this summer during a previously planned street reconstruction. They’ll be planted in the spring of 2006.
Help Us Tell the Story
Photos and video of the first rain garden street in Seattle helped build support for the idea in Madison. We want to document the Adams Street project. We invite you to take part.
Photographers and poets, artists and journalists — please help us capture the spirit of this project before, during, and after construction. We want to show the rain garden street as an important watershed-wide approach to cleaner water. We hope to inspire many more.
Read more
- Learn more about the Adams Street project and check up on its status
- FOLW’s introduction to rain gardens (including directions to Madison gardens)
- Learn more about the rain garden streets in Seattle, WA that inspired the Friends to explore this idea and bring it to Madison