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Creating Rain Gardens
“A beautifully-written, practical guide to planning and creating your own rain garden.” —
Green Upgrader
You probably spend hundreds of dollars watering your yard, but there is an easy way to save money and resources—by collecting rain to reuse in front and backyards. In Creating Rain Gardens, water conservation experts Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Apryl Uncapher walk you through the entire process, with step-by-step instructions for designing and building swales, French drains, rain gardens, and ephemeral ponds. From soil preparation, planting, troubleshooting, and maintenance, to selecting palettes of water-loving plants that provide four-season interest and a habitat for wildlife, Creating Rain Gardens covers everything you need to create a beautiful rain garden at home.
You probably spend hundreds of dollars watering your yard, but there is an easy way to save money and resources—by collecting rain to reuse in front and backyards. In Creating Rain Gardens, water conservation experts Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Apryl Uncapher walk you through the entire process, with step-by-step instructions for designing and building swales, French drains, rain gardens, and ephemeral ponds. From soil preparation, planting, troubleshooting, and maintenance, to selecting palettes of water-loving plants that provide four-season interest and a habitat for wildlife, Creating Rain Gardens covers everything you need to create a beautiful rain garden at home.
208 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2012
32 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 2, 2025
Solid introduction to the subject, but it assumes a) you have a slope and b) you have space to dig down.
September 5, 2019
This book is going to save my house. I borrowed about 10 rain garden books from the library and this was the best one.
May 1, 2021
It appears that quite a few books seek to answer the question of how one goes about making rain gardens, or where one goes about making rain gardens by taking advantage of terrain in swales, but there are definitely aspects of this book that make someone wonder why it is that someone is going to create a water garden. What is the gain that people have in creating a water-efficient garden. The aim of rain gardens is pretty straightforward, and that is taking the rain that would normally lead to massive runoff and allow it to slowly percolate into the groundwater. This is obviously better for a variety of reasons, namely that it helps reduce the stress of run-off water and on the ground, and it also helps aquifers by providing the filtering of graywater through plants to slow its velocity and also clean it a little. Yet it does not appear to be an easy thing to make a good rain garden, since the goal is to slow down the rain and clean it through moving it through plants into the groundwater, but not to let the water stay in a given area, and that is a tricky balance.
This book is a bit less than 200 pages long and it is divided into a variety of chapters and other material. The book begins with acknowledgements and an introduction that discusses the garden in the river and the pools in the garden as a means of connecting plants and water. After that the book discusses the choose-your-own-adventure nature of rain gardens (1). This is followed by a discussion of how to design one's rain garden (2). This is then quite naturally followed by a chapter on building one's rain garden (3) and then planting it (4). After that there is a discussion of how one maintain one's rain garden (5). After that the book goes into some detail on how one uses a rain garden as part of a larger integrated landscape design (6), and then an epilogue on collaborating on common waters that takes a bit more political of a discussion. The book then ends with a look at ecological regions, resources, photography credits, and an index.
This book is certainly designed for a certain type of reader with a somewhat short attention span and a certain susceptibility to hype. I must admit that I found the graphic design of the book a bit off-putting. This book was clearly not designed with me in mind as a reader, especially because it included so many distracting sidebars and not as much sustained writing as I would have preferred, to say nothing for the way that pages look. When it comes to the content, there is more to enjoy here as the authors really do know a good deal about what they are talking about. One of the things I found interesting about this book was the focus that the authors had about capturing the rain, something which makes sense when one is making a rain garden, but something that one cannot assume one's readers is going to realize. If one wants a good rain garden, it is of vital importance that one do a good job at connecting the sources of the rain to the garden that one wants to make, and it is similarly important to connect it to groundwater so that one does not make a permanent wetlands. It would at least seem that this sort of thing was obvious.
This book is a bit less than 200 pages long and it is divided into a variety of chapters and other material. The book begins with acknowledgements and an introduction that discusses the garden in the river and the pools in the garden as a means of connecting plants and water. After that the book discusses the choose-your-own-adventure nature of rain gardens (1). This is followed by a discussion of how to design one's rain garden (2). This is then quite naturally followed by a chapter on building one's rain garden (3) and then planting it (4). After that there is a discussion of how one maintain one's rain garden (5). After that the book goes into some detail on how one uses a rain garden as part of a larger integrated landscape design (6), and then an epilogue on collaborating on common waters that takes a bit more political of a discussion. The book then ends with a look at ecological regions, resources, photography credits, and an index.
This book is certainly designed for a certain type of reader with a somewhat short attention span and a certain susceptibility to hype. I must admit that I found the graphic design of the book a bit off-putting. This book was clearly not designed with me in mind as a reader, especially because it included so many distracting sidebars and not as much sustained writing as I would have preferred, to say nothing for the way that pages look. When it comes to the content, there is more to enjoy here as the authors really do know a good deal about what they are talking about. One of the things I found interesting about this book was the focus that the authors had about capturing the rain, something which makes sense when one is making a rain garden, but something that one cannot assume one's readers is going to realize. If one wants a good rain garden, it is of vital importance that one do a good job at connecting the sources of the rain to the garden that one wants to make, and it is similarly important to connect it to groundwater so that one does not make a permanent wetlands. It would at least seem that this sort of thing was obvious.
February 18, 2013
This was much more useful than the other book I read on the topic (Rain Gardens: Bringing Water to Life in the Designed Landscape). Woefle-Erskine provides practical advice on how to plan, site, design, and dig your rain garden. There are lots of diagrams with different perspectives (e.g. side and overhead), forms to help with calculations, and a few case studies - all on a manageable scale for an American yard.
February 13, 2015
Very technical guide to creating rain gardens and implementing other means of diverting water from the sewers. Also contains sample projects that could give the reader some ideas, though since they are mostly large corporate installations, they would need to be scaled down to the home garden.
July 20, 2012
I wish I were more confident in my DIY skills. I would love to create a rain garden, but I feel limited by my skills and my space. Reading this book, though, gives me hope.
December 12, 2018
Excellent detail into how to build your own rain garden, with case studies to encourage and inspire.
November 13, 2022
Read and skimmed this along with another book called Rain Gardens. To do this seriously seems to involve mapping it out, measuring how much water you typically get, knowing your soil — I think I need to be more of a gardener before I get that far. It also seems like to do it officially you need to contact the local government to get a cut in the curb, so I think I will just try to replace my street-side lawn with some plants and see how that goes before I graduate to this. Maybe get a rain barrel for the backyard, though then it mentioned wanting to know what your roof tiles are made of so you don’t get dangerous run off into your veggies, and I certainly don’t know.
February 26, 2022
This was a well crafted approach to the subject, with lots of excellent background and advice to home gardeners who need to know 1. Why and 2. How to manage runoff from their yards. There is good info on actual installation. What was disappointing was the aesthetic approach, or more pointedly, lack thereof. This audience needs color, not poor quality black and white, and it would be far better to illustrate various designs in place of the collection of case histories, with plant photos to illustrate the dry lists. This was an unfortunate missed opportunity to truly inspire, visually.
February 12, 2022
Technically very valuable but it would be more convincing and attractive if it had included colored photographs. The minimal number of black and white photos do not help the reader visualize the results. Likewise the lack of information on the plants to include reduces the books impact.
November 28, 2018
Very technical but good information. I will likely refer
To chapters 4 and 5 again.
To chapters 4 and 5 again.
December 12, 2012
In a world which is heating up and where long-lasting droughts are becoming more and more common, the value of the water provided free to us by Mother Nature cannot be overrated. And yet much - probably most - of that water is not utilized as it might be to enhance the environment. Often it simply runs off along gutters and down storm drains, picking up contaminants as it goes and sweeping them into lakes, streams, rivers, and, ultimately, oceans and creating a whole additional environmental problem.
It is easy for an individual gardener to feel overwhelmed by the environmental devastation facing Earth, to feel impotent about doing anything to effect a solution. But the waste of rainwater is most definitely something that we can and should do something about. In this book, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Apryl Uncapher explain to us with step-by-step instructions just how we can accomplish that.
Capturing rainwater is a way to make your own garden practices more water-efficient and self-sustaining, and there are many different ways to do this. Perhaps the most familiar and the easiest method is the rain barrel which captures the water run-off from your roof, water which you can then use in watering your garden. From this easiest of methods, one can progress through many phases right up to the full-blown rain garden which captures rainwater runoff which is then absorbed back into your garden. Such places are magnets for birds, butterflies, dragonflies, many beneficial insects, as well as other interesting wildlife like reptiles and amphibians and even small mammals.
Some of the other methods of conserving water that are outlined in the book include permeable patios, simple living roofs, and planters that harvest rainwater from their surroundings. The authors also include lists of water-loving plants and explain how to work them into your gardening palette for maximum benefit. Examples are given for a prairie rain garden, a native wildflower garden, and even an edible rain garden.
This is the kind of practical handbook which I, as a gardener, find most useful - fewer airy-fairy theories and more down and dirty instructions. If you are that kind of gardener and you are interested in conserving rainwater, you might enjoy this book.
(Full disclosure: A copy of the book was provided to me by the publisher, Timber Press, free of charge for the purposes of this review.)
It is easy for an individual gardener to feel overwhelmed by the environmental devastation facing Earth, to feel impotent about doing anything to effect a solution. But the waste of rainwater is most definitely something that we can and should do something about. In this book, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Apryl Uncapher explain to us with step-by-step instructions just how we can accomplish that.
Capturing rainwater is a way to make your own garden practices more water-efficient and self-sustaining, and there are many different ways to do this. Perhaps the most familiar and the easiest method is the rain barrel which captures the water run-off from your roof, water which you can then use in watering your garden. From this easiest of methods, one can progress through many phases right up to the full-blown rain garden which captures rainwater runoff which is then absorbed back into your garden. Such places are magnets for birds, butterflies, dragonflies, many beneficial insects, as well as other interesting wildlife like reptiles and amphibians and even small mammals.
Some of the other methods of conserving water that are outlined in the book include permeable patios, simple living roofs, and planters that harvest rainwater from their surroundings. The authors also include lists of water-loving plants and explain how to work them into your gardening palette for maximum benefit. Examples are given for a prairie rain garden, a native wildflower garden, and even an edible rain garden.
This is the kind of practical handbook which I, as a gardener, find most useful - fewer airy-fairy theories and more down and dirty instructions. If you are that kind of gardener and you are interested in conserving rainwater, you might enjoy this book.
(Full disclosure: A copy of the book was provided to me by the publisher, Timber Press, free of charge for the purposes of this review.)
February 12, 2014
its good i mean great
April 8, 2014
3.5 stars Very interesting book but not quite what I was looking for.
October 6, 2018
This is a good hands-on guide to getting started on your own rain garden.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews