“April, come she will, when streams are ripe and swelled with rain.”

So sings Art Garfunkel in one of my favourite songs of the season (there are few). That pure, crystalline voice always evokes pictures of snowbanks dripping into rushing waters under a brilliant winter sky. As March leaves us, cold and damp with a final, inevitable, dumping of snow, and April is forecast to be rainy, there won’t be many brilliant skies but plenty of swollen streams.

All that water has me thinking and digging into rain gardens. I’ve been hearing the term more often in the last few years, usually in relation to native gardening and urban runoff. On a late winter day, watching the water rush down my street and into the storm drain, I decided to explore a gardener’s way to save that water.

A rain garden is simply that, a garden designed for the rain. More nuanced, it is a collection of plants designed to collect and filter water that would otherwise run overland, into storm drains and eventually into our waterways. This water often sweeps pollutants, debris, and soil along with it leading to the poisoning of aquatic flora and fauna. Rain gardens also help prevent the erosion that so often happens with sudden and intense rainstorms. Usually consisting of plants that........

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