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Anyone residing in the Lowcountry, especially near the coast, has to learn to live with a certain amount of flooding. But when the water is pooling in your yard for sometimes days on end, it could be time for a solution.
The Kiawah Conservancy presented their solution in the form of rain gardens at the May 2 Kiawah Island Town Council meeting. Lee Bundrick, senior ecological health and conservation coordinator for the Kiawah Conservancy, spoke about two upcoming rain garden projects they have planned to help with some of the flooding in and around the town. However, these rain gardens will also serve an educational purpose.
In 2022, the Kiawah Conservancy was given funding from the Town to install demonstration rain gardens to help educate residents, property owners and contractors on their aesthetic and function.
The Kiawah Conservancy will use these demos as an opportunity to discuss the potential that rain gardens have for water mitigation practices. These efforts come after they published their Nature Based Solutions Manual for Kiawah Island, which identified 13 different practices that they deem as acceptable for use on the island.
The Kiawah Conservancy also looked at the potential options that rain gardens have on marsh protection for water mitigation.
“A lot will come from marsh rescue practices that we might see in the future,” Bundrick added. “In particular, we want to focus on rain gardens because they are a fairly simple concept.”
Bundrick defines rain gardens as a depression in the ground that collects excess stormwater run-off from impervious surfaces and allows the water to sink into the ground.
The EPA states that a rain garden is “a depressed area in the landscape that collects rainwater from a roof, driveway or street and allows it to soak into the ground.”
The idea is to limit the amount of runoff going into stormwater ponds. The groundwater recharge will ensure that there is no standing water in the rain garden for a 24-hour period. This means that once the water is in the rain garden, it is gone within 24 hours.
“It is a fairly functional component to the landscape but does provide aesthetic appeal as well,” Bundrick said.
The Kiawah Conservancy team looked at different sites for the rain garden demos in or around the Town’s limits. The sites need to be functional in the sense that they need to provide a purpose for education and demonstrations, but also work as a rain garden should.
Bundrick said they identified that one rain garden would go near Council chambers – next to the open field by the visitors parking lot. “This site would generally focus on capturing rainwater that would come from the walkway in that area that would drain into there,” he said. Bundrick said they also looked at Rhett’s Bluff Boat Landing as a potential site for a rain garden.
“This site runs into the swell that goes to a drain and then to the marsh,” he explained. “So this would be capturing water from an impervious drainage area. This would help limit the excess water that would go straight to the marsh.”
Bundrick said that they are currently just waiting to install the rain garden in the identified locations, and that installation should only take about a day.
“Once the rain gardens are installed, we will hold workshops that will be available to the public, as well as contractors, and Kiawah Island employees interested in learning more about them,” he said.
Bundrick also said that they will be working with Clemson Extension on hosting the workshops.
He concluded the presentation by clarifying that he knew that Rhett’s Bluff was technically outside of the gate of the Town of Kiawah Island, which funds Kiawah Conservancy.
“The designs will come from public funds, but Kiawah Conservancy will pay for the cost of materials and installation for that particular location,” he said.
The rain gardens will incorporate all native plants into a conceptual design. The plants would be all different colors and some would be seasonal.
Kiawah Conservancy suggests using native plants for rain gardens like spicebush, river oats, blue flag iris, spider lilies, swamp milkweed, scarlet sage, and blue mistflower, among others.
For more information, visit kiawahconservancy.org/rain-garden.