Senior Center builds Rain Garden

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

The new landscaping at the Abingdon Senior Center is for more than just aesthetics. It’s practical.

The horseshoe of small trees and shrubbery forms a Rain Garden, landscaping that will prevent the 1,000 square-foot puddle from accumulating on the lawn as in years past.

“The ducks would be up here swimming, which was pretty but not what was intended,” said Patricia Wirt, executive director of the activity center at the Abingdon Senior Center. 

With the help from an Upper Tennessee River Roundtable grant and the work of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Master Gardeners and the Abingdon Senior Center the project now filters storm water runoff through the soft mulch and native plant subsoil, cleaning it before the waters reaches the aquifers below. 

Project landscaper Jeff Stapleton of Scott County said designing rain gardens is a practice that’s underused.

He said the water needs to go somewhere. Stapleton said he could probably go to any business and find a spot that needed storm water management, even just a soupy part of the lawn or a sitting puddle in a parking lot.

“There’s so much more development and pavement and that increases the amount of water that’s going to run off somewhere,” Carol Doss, of the Roundtable, said.

Large puddles that accumulate in public spaces are not only unsightly and attract mosquitoes, but the nearby waterways can become muddied or polluted because the runoff cannot naturally cleanse itself, Stapleton said.

The Roundtable has six other storm management projects in the area including two Rain Gardens at Abingdon Elementary School.

To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail or call (276) 628-7101.