Rainy Day Garden Party

A block of homes between Gannon Ave. and Cornell Ave. has become a unique laboratory for the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD).

Seven rain gardens have been planted in six backyards to study how nature collects water runoff when it rains, and how that process can be introduced to an urban environment.

“Rain gardens mimic a lot of how nature handles water runoff,”said Leslie Sawyer, the principal engineer in MSD’s design group for the project. “These gardens will be instrumental in helping us achieve our big goal of solving storm water problems such as erosion and yard ponding.”

MSD partnered with Washington University, the Missouri Botanical Garden's Shaw Nature Reserve, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and a host of other groups in designing and constructing the rain gardens. Only native Missouri plants were used, in order to best replicate what the area used to be like 200 years ago.

“This area was a savannah type setting prior to settlement,” said John Wingo, a contractor on the project and board member of the Missouri Prairie Foundation. “The deep-rooted plants help to cycle nutrients through the ground, constantly creating new top soil that helped to naturally handle water runoff. We’re trying to recreate that original nutrient cycle with this project.”

The rain garden block party Sunday afternoon highlighted what the project has accomplished so far and encouraged others to copy University City’s lead. Flowers were being given out to guests so that they can plant their own rain gardens, and booths were set up to give instructions and tips on how to do just that.

The project is a pilot program that will be monitored by MSD and Washington University. Data taken from before the rain gardens were planted will be compared to data taken after. They will be compared to see just how the rain gardens perform compared to more traditional urban methods of collecting water runoff, such as channels and sewers.

“This is just scratching the surface,” Devin Chandler, the project’s plant supplier with Prairie Hill Farm, said. “Everyone is concerned about runoff and rain gardens are all the talk right now.”

This block was chosen because the watershed was small enough that reliable predictions and numbers could be put together prior to beginning the project. A watershed is the area of land where all of the water beneath it or which drains off of it goes into the same place.

Urban water runoff is the chief source of water pollution, and these gardens represent a cleaner way of handling the runoff without polluting it.

“Not only are we offering cleaner alternative here, but this also offers us the opportunity to discover so much more about how these natural systems work,” Wingo said. “We understand the macro of it all, but we want to learn more about the details. This project allows us to do just that.”