Any information from campuses on how bio-swales are performing?
I would love to hear from anyone who has implimented bio-swales and rain gardens on campus. How are they performing? Have they reduces storm water run-off as anticipated? What is the perception of people about the aesthetic of them? Do people "get" them?
What unexpected issues have come up and what lessons learned?
I have walked on several campuses recently and seen rain gardens and I am just a tad bit concerned that they all look very similar. Landscaping is a big part of each campuses creating its own identity. Any trick emerging on this?
Sure does. help. We are installing a number of them on NW campuses. Only once did we get push back. The campus president was afraid it would be designated a wetland and could hinder development in the future. So now he pays thousands of dollars each year for a oil/water separation system for his parking lot, when this could be free though bio-swales.
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Hi Ron,
I don't have experience with rain gardens on college campuses, but I did work as the coordinator for a rain garden project in Lexington, Ky (www.bluegrassraingardenalliance.org) that put rain gardens on K-12 school campuses. Most of those gardens ended up being quite different from each other and their form was based on the available resources, space, and the amount of runoff anticipated (affecting the ultimate size of the garden). I think it's important to continue promoting the idea that a rain garden can take almost any shape and there's a lot of room for creativity in their design. It seemed like most people I worked with who were looking at more conservative ideas for the design just felt uncomfortable with how the garden would function as a stormwater mitigation tool and so they wanted to stay true to a commonly described form for fear that the garden wouldn't work properly. Maybe as people become more comfortable with the idea of rain gardens and how they work they will be more likely to step "outside the box" in the design. The gardens that I saw, if they were designed properly, performed quite well and according to expectations, dramatically reducing the amount of stormwater that ran off.
As for the aesthetic, I think that people think rain gardens are attractive. One concern I commonly found was that, since we were using native plants, the garden would end up looking "wild" or "weedy." That was often easily resolved by using low-growing plants and spending time laying out the garden so that the plants would be well-arranged and attractive. I also talked a lot to people about changing perceptions of what makes an attractive garden and the advantages of providing food and habitat for native animals in our landscaping.
Some of the issues we came across were concerns about who would maintain the gardens (since proper maintenance is critical to ongoing proper functioning) and safety (were people walking across campus going to trip and fall into the swale that was created).
Hope this helps!