Rain Garden Tour

I recently was asked to create a few plant lists for clients for whom we installed rain gardens. I immediately got out the picture books for inspiration--Daniel Shaw and Rusty Schmidt's Plants for Stormwater Design and the Prairie Nursery plant catalog. While flipping madly through pages and scribbling Latin words, I already had the image in my mind of the perfect rain garden. It was the rain garden at the Ramsey-Washington Metro Watershed District office that I had I visited in August.

The visit was part of the annual LEAP (Landscape Ecology Awards Program) Garden Tour, and I thought it was the best garden of the three on tour. The rain gardens were lush, bursting with blooms, and full of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Sedges and grasses undulated throughout with the blues and purples of fragrant hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and liatris species.

The design has since inspired my plant selections for client rain garden projects.

the downspout

In bloom: blazingstars, boneset, bee balm, Joe Pye weed, fragrant hyssop...

 August color

blazingstars and prairie onions