Rain garden — Summit

The Summit clients had a corner of the backyard that flooded every storm — two downspouts emptied straight into it, and the grass was always either soaked or burnt. We shaped the corner into a shallow basin and planted it as a rain garden.

The plant palette was about wet-and-dry tolerance: blue flag iris and swamp milkweed for the wet center, soft rush and tussock sedge for the middle, switchgrass and joe-pye weed on the higher edges, all of which can handle a few days submerged or a couple of weeks dry.

It’s quiet in year one — most of the energy is going underground — but it’s already doing the job. Rainwater that used to sheet across the lawn now sinks in within an hour, and the corner looks like something instead of nothing.