Waterford

Curb Appeal

Oct 15, 2005

Replacing Parts of Lawn With Gardens Can Help Preserve the Chesapeake Bay

How much do you like your lawn? A lot? A little? Do you groom it to a golf-course green and glow with pride when your neighbors turn almost as
green with envy, or do you hate every precious minute it takes to mow the stuff?

Lawns are up to 90 percent impervious," Zora Lathan of the Chesapeake Ecology Center says. "Most people don't realize that." Impervious spaces -- not just lawns, but buildings, driveways, parking lots, streets and highways -- fail to catch and hold rainwater. Instead, the water simply runs off, carrying with it any contaminants or pollutants (gasoline, fertilizer, pesticides) and filling storm sewers or swelling streams, which in turn pour potentially deadly water down through watersheds
and into bodies of water such as the Chesapeake Bay.

"Any water that falls on your land should stay," Lathan said. That doesn't mean it simply sits there. Water should slowly percolate into the ground, becoming cleaned and purified, then replenish the aquifer, the water-holding layer that is the source of well water. Water that runs off never gets to the aquifer, and it never gets cleaned of chemicals that can lead to reduced
oxygen in bodies of water, such as the Chesapeake Bay, endangering fish, crabs and other forms of life.

While some of the pollution that's causing oxygen levels to drop comes from farms and commercial operations that aren't under the control of ordinary people, every bit of effort to stop runoff is important, Lathan said. "We need better landscaping processes, or we will pay a price. You may not care about the environment from a landscaping perspective, but you do care about
what's on your dinner plate. "Now we know there are better ways to handle runoff than building drainage culverts. The swales will be turned into "rain gardens," planted areas where water will not run off, but will be absorbed into the soil.

Creating a rain garden is one of things people can do to improve their immediate environment. Lathan is always surprised that people think it
difficult. A rain garden is no more than a 3- to 6-inch, saucer-shaped depression planted with native grasses and flowering perennials. The
depression and the plants collect rain and let it seep into the earth. The depression shouldn't be so deep that water pools -- it should be gone in 24 to 48 hours.

And the area needn't be large. "Any size rain garden is better than no rain garden," Lathan said. Good plants for a native rain garden are switchgrass ( Panicum virgatum ), smooth white penstemon ( P. digitalis ), silky dogwood ( Cornus amomum ), arrowwood viburnum ( V. dentatum ), spicebush ( Lindera benzoin ), cinnamon fern ( Osmunda cinnamomea ) and big blue lobelia ( Lobelia siphilitica ).