RainScaping Newsletter
Happy Holidays! A New Year, A New Era!
Food For Thought for the Season…
Winter, a lingering season, is a time to gather golden moments, embark upon a sentimental journey, and enjoy every idle hour. —John Boswell
Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. —Pietro Aretino. And it's a great time to plan your RainScaping projects.
Short of Aphrodite, there is nothing lovelier on this planet than a flower, nor more essential than a plant. The true matrix of human life is the greensward covering mother earth. Without green plants we would neither breathe nor eat. On the undersurface of every leaf a million movable lips are engaged in devouring carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. All together, 25 million square miles of leaf surface are daily engaged in this miracle of photosynthesis, producing oxygen and food for man and beast. —Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants
Ilex verticillata - Winterberry
Winterberry is a deciduous holly that is slow growing, with an upright-rounded habit. In the wild, it often suckers to form large thickets or colonies but can be pruned to form a small tree. Inconspicuous greenish-white flowers appear in late spring and give way to a crop of bright red berries in late summer to fall. Berries are quite showy and persist through most of the winter, hence the common name.Full Article...
Mark Your Calendars for Upcoming 2010 RainScaping Presentations on Rain Gardens and Native Plants!
Saturday, March 27th, Noon, RainScaping Presentation at South County Library, 5940 Deale-Churchton Road, Deale, MD 20751.Sunday, April 18th 11 a.m., RainScaping Presentation for St. Anne's Environmental Ministry, 199 Duke of Gloucester Street, Annapolis, Maryland 21401.
Saturday, May 15th, 9 - 11 a.m., RainScaping Presentation at Back Creek Nature Park, 1314 Edgewood Road, Annapolis, Maryland 21401.
See Annapolis Green's Calendar for an up-to-date, comprehensive listing of environmental happenings in Anne Arundel County.
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Rain Garden Facts and Fiction: What a Rain Garden Is and Is NotA "Rain Garden" is a fairly simple landscaping arrangement that is a vegetated depression where rainwater temporarily ponds. Usually simple enough to design and install without specialized technical expertise, rain gardens are simply low-lying, vegetated depressions—generally 3 to 6 inches deep—which have absorbent soils that temporarily collect stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces and allow the runoff to slowly percolate into the soil—usually with a few hours to 48 hours. A rain garden is not a pond or a wetland; nor is it a complex "Bioretention Installation."Full Article... |
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Rain Garden Facts and Fiction: Rain Gardens Don't Breed MosquitoesMosquitoes lay eggs in standing water. Rain gardens do not hold rainwater long enough for mosquitoes to reproduce successfully. According to Dr. David N. Gaines, Public Health Entomologist, Virginia Department of Health: "Most mosquito species can complete their life cycle in a flood pool or puddle that is present for more than 2 weeks, but will not be able to survive in a puddle that dries up after only one week."Full Article... |
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Rain Garden Facts and Fiction: Your Rain Garden May Work Perfectly, or it May Need AdjustingInstalling a rain garden incorporates both science and art. Your rain garden may or may not work perfectly right after installation is completed. Fret not; it's often part of the process to make adjustments over time as needed, based on your site conditions. For example, if you are mitigating a large area of impervious surface runoff with a rain garden, it may be helpful to channel the water so that it travels across a stone bed—which may need adjusting—before it reaches the plants. The stone bed can help slow the water so that it doesn't wash away the first plants as it reaches the garden. Also, if your rain garden receives too much runoff, you may need to channel excess runoff to additional planting beds.Full Article... |
The RainScaping Campaign—an Environmental Partnership for Stormwater Runoff Solutions—currently has 38 non-profit and government partners, all with a common purpose of improving the health of our tributaries and the Chesapeake Bay by motivating a critical mass of residents to make RainScaping the norm in Anne Arundel County.
Visit RainScaping.org where you'll find rainscaping information; an extensive, sortable native plant list; and calculators to help you determine the size of your rain garden, number of plants needed, and amount of mulch needed. There are also numerous resources listed on the Resources/Media Kit page.