Senate Rain Garden

The Senate Rain Garden, built in 2004, is an exemplary initiative and innovation for replicable low-impact, sustainable projects for storm water management. It represents a new and improved way of doing business in our agency. Broadly, rain gardens take advantage of gravity and processes of nature, enabling certain plants to filter runoff from parking lots, reducing storm flooding into urban streets and sewer systems, and to keep pollutants from entering local streams, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay. Rain gardens, with their teeming, sturdy, flowering plants are an attractive, low-impact and low-cost way to protect and enhance our environment. Financially, our agency is enabled by this project to relieve Washington, DC, of the costly burden of treating storm water. The rain garden provides the opportunity for work crews to devote their time to other projects while nature gracefully provides sustainability to capture and filter water. Aesthetically, these durable plants flourish in water up to their knees and in droughts. While nearby lawn areas turn brown in hot weather, the rain garden plants remain lushly green and in flower.