How to Design a Garden to Handle Flooding

Five Ideas for Your Water-Logged Garden

Water iris in the bog by the pond at Havenwood today.

A Wet Summer

We have had loads of heavy rain over the past few weeks, including on our open garden days to benefit the library. When two dozen people arrived this past Saturday morning, all of them having driven for over an hour to see Havenwood, their tour was delayed as three inches of rain abruptly fell from the sky. The heavens opened up and those who made it to the potting shed were lucky to have a good viewing spot for the next hour while it continued to come down.

The potting shed and pond areas seen through today’s downpour.

I wondered if I was over dramatizing this post by using the word “flooding” for our garden, since we do not have an actual river that pops up after a hard rain. But the definition is pretty broad:

Flooding—the covering or submerging of normally dry land with a large amount of water.

So after a series of downpours, when we have several inches of water where it is otherwise dry, this definition fits. The fact is that we have built several areas in the garden that are made to catch this overflow on wet days, though most other days they are indeed dry.

View from the pond at Havenwood

Here are five ways our garden is designed to cope with severe rainstorms: