Rain Gardens: Where Rain Takes Root

Rain gardens are designed to capture and filter stormwater, reducing flooding and
removing pollutants before they reach rivers, lakes, and oceans. They are made up of
gravel, soil, and different plants (Green Infrastructure, 2025). Urban areas with large
amounts of concrete, such as New York City, often experience flooding, leading to
soil erosion, sewage overflow, and poor water quality. It is also important to note that
flooding can cause lots of damage to city infrastructure. To solve this issue, New York
has put resources into building rain gardens. (Green Infrastructure Annual Report,
2023). Harlem, New York City is at high risk for flooding, and has very few rain
gardens. (NYC Flood Hazard Mapper, 2017). The goal of our experiment is to see
which soil compositions are most effective or might harm the ability of rain gardens to
mitigate urban stormwater flooding. In this experiment, we created six rain garden
models using topsoil, compost and trash, compost, and topsoil with trash. We chose
to use topsoil as our control, because it is commonly used in rain gardens. We chose
to add trash because it is often found in city rain gardens. Last but not least, we chose
compost because it is nutrient dense, which is helpful for plant growth (Compost
supplementation with nutrients and microorganisms in composting process, 2017). We
also created an online survey regarding rain gardens that we sent out to people in
New York City, which we hope will help raise awareness about the lack of rain gardens
in certain communities. Understanding this relationship can help city planners and
communities build more effective rain gardens that improve urban water management.