A rain garden is a miniature eco-system that you can create
right in your back yard! It's a small-scale oasis that doesn't
take a lot of space, and once you have it set up, they're cheap
and easy to maintain. When the folks at Timber Press offered to
send me a copy of Creating Rain Gardens, I was expecting a
totally different sort of book. I'd never heard the term rain
garden before and thought this book would be all about building
rain barrels, basically. Was I ever pleased to be wrong! What is
a Rain Garden? Basically, a rain garden helps solve many of the
problems created by urban development. It reduces water
pollution and flooding by catching water and letting it filter
through soil and root systems which cleanses the water on the
way back to the aquifer. It also helps reverse habitat
destruction by creating a space where native plants and animals
can thrive. The book is a beautifully-written practical guide to
planning and creating your own rain garden, and I found myself
underlining passages as I read