Rain Gardens for the Pacific Northwest: Design and Build Your Own

Rain pounds the Pacific Northwest, gushing through dirty downspouts, across chemically treated lawns, over oily streets and through public storm drains into bays, rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands where nature struggles to survive among the pollutants. It's a problem caused by population density and it's one that you can help solve.

Rain Gardens for the Pacific Northwest shows you how to trap and filter dirty water safely in your yard--and how to do that with a beautiful addition to your home. Zsofia Pasztor, a Certified Professional Horticulturalist, shares what she's learned over the years experimenting with rain gardens in the challenging clay and hardpan soils of the region. The book answers questions that Zsofia regularly encounters in her workshops, including:

- Can I build a rain garden myself?
- Can a rain garden be too big or too small?
- Can I create a low-maintenance rain garden?
- Will my rain garden attract mosquitos?
- How do you know if your infiltration system is in a "safe" location?
- If my rain garden isn't working (e.g., not draining), how can I fix it without starting over?

With photos and illustrations throughout, lists of best plants, and a comprehensive resources section, this easy-to-use guide shows Northwest gardeners, homeowners, and DIY-ers how to plan, design, install, and maintain their own healthy, natural, and beautiful rain garden.

Review Quotes:

"..the perfect book for the designer who is ready to roll up their sleeves and get started on creating a rain garden." "..this book empowers readers to design and build rain gardens of their own. Paired with other books for "garden inspiration," Rain Gardens is a useful and powerful tool for homeowners and landscape designers."--Esther Jackson, New York Botanical Garden

"The book's big accomplishment is grounding all the details of construction, plants and aesthetics within the bigger picture of environmental concerns. If you want to learn how water percolates through roots and soils, there's a graphic for that. Yet from climate concerns to amphibians, the authors keep the bigger ecological picture in mind."--Easton Val,The Seattle Times