"I love your dry streambed!"

It is not designed as a dry stream bed but as a wet one.

A rain garden, actually.  The basic idea is to "manage" stormwater by getting it into the aquifer rather than discharging it directly to very large and expensive stormwater sewers.

Once in the aquifer, it can discharge slowly to streams or directly to the Sound.

Equally important, plants in the streambed and soil biota remove well over 90% of pollutants before the water is discharged.  The plants have been selected for both water tolerance and drought.  (The biota come with the soil!) All the smaller rocks in the streambed were sifted from other landscape projects on the site.

None of the water in the rain garden comes from our house.  

We were required to install a very large "dry well" to discharge all water coming from the roof of the house.  

The water going into the rain garden comes from runoff from other houses along the street that were constructed before dry wells were required.  

Mary Ann Firmin 

Jerry Parker