Rain Gardens: Helping Nature in Your Own Front Yard

Target Audience: Homeowners, green industry professionals, landscape designers; anyone with a general to specific level of landscape knowledge that would like to learn more about rain gardens.

Issues Addressed: Illustrates through a Flash animation format the basics of rain garden planning and design for effective stormwater management at a residential scale, and illustrates and explains why each principle or rule-of-thumb is critical to overall garden success. Most important, it explains the functional attributes of gardens below the ground surface which are difficult for audiences to visualize but are never-the-less important to garden success.

Distribution: the animation was developed over two years and final edits were completed in 2009; use in presentations and web access linkage development was completed in 2010. The animation is now available through a link on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Water Website within the Property Design and Management section (http://water.unl.edu/web/propertydesign/home).

Resources Involved: The animation was developed through an internal University of Nebraska-Lincoln extension grant totaling $7,500. The grant paid for storyboard development, animation development and editing, and final production. Steven Rodie worked with/directed Patty Morner, a Technology Asst. at UNL in animation concept development and Patty was responsible for the overall technical development and execution of the animation. In addition, the rain garden model that serves as the basis for the animation was conceptualized and designed by Steve Rodie and Tom Franti, a UNL Surface Water Engineer, and built and photographed by Steve Rodie.

Evaluation Results: Since the animation has only recently been made available to target audiences, no evaluation results are yet available. An additional web link to some brief evaluation questions is being planned so that feedback on the impact value of the animation information delivery and format can be solicited from animation viewers.

Implications for Future Programming: Copies of the animation are being developed for use in rain garden workshops and Master Gardener training presentations to focus delivery of critical rain garden design information. In addition, the animation is being reviewed for possible reworking as a youth or 4-H instructional animation incorporating stormwater cartoon characters that would help explain the workings of a rain garden and the water quality benefits associated with landscape and soil filtering of runoff.

Files

Rain Garden Animation

The file is in Flash format and best played by opening in a browser such as Mozilla or Explorer that has a Flash Player plug in. The file is also available for viewing on the UNL Water Website on the Property Design and Management page under the Rain Garden Virtual Simulation heading: http://water.unl.edu/web/propertydesign/home