What is a rain garden?

A rain garden is a garden which takes advantage of rainfall and storm water runoff in its design and plant selection. Rain gardens are becoming increasingly popular in the home landscape nowadays. A rain garden is a natural or dug shallow depression designed to capture and soak up storm water runoff from your roof or other impervious areas around your home like driveways, walkways, and even compacted lawn areas. They can be used as a buffer to shoreline areas to capture runoff from the home landscape before it enters a lake, pond, or river. Soils are engineered and suitable trees, shrubs, flowers, and other plants are selected to allow runoff to soak into the ground. Plants with deep fibrous roots tend to have a competitive advantage in a rain garden and provide the most cleaning and filtration benefits to the environment.

Storm water runoff is considered one of the main sources of water pollution nation-wide. But rain gardens provide flood control, groundwater recharge, and water-cooling benefits, while the plants, soils, remove pollutant such as excess nutrients, pesticides, oils, metals, and other contaminants from storm water runoff. So in addition to adding beauty to your home landscape, rain gardens can also help protect water quality. Moreover, rain gardens require less maintenance than lawns because they do not need to be mowed, fertilized, or watered once established.

In short, a rain garden is a small bioretention cell in which storm water is cleaned and reduced in volume once it enters the rain garden. These gardens are therefore designed for habitat and low maintenance goals rather than purely seasonal aesthetics.

In this climate change and environmental degradation when the need to be greener is growing faster than ever, airports are under stringent radar.  Airport planners now give more weight to the impact their operations have on the environment; so other than introducing better infrastructure, minimizing congestion, disruption and air pollution, and improving technology to come up with quieter aircraft engines, airports are also becoming greener, both literally and metaphorically. And this is how they are doing it..

Bowl-shaped rain gardens alongside the longest runway at India’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad has been designed to capture
storm water and then recycle it, using a process called ‘groundwater recharge’. The project at the Shamshabad located gateway followed a trial carried out by the National Geographical Research Institute (NGRI), which developed nine model rain gardens to test. The rain garden set up at the Hyderabad airport was so successful that it was decided to replicate it at other international airports in India.