Hutchesons' Grammar School

This cottage garden is designed with adaptation in mind. Climate change is bringing more intense rainfall and this garden captures rain and slows it down to help reduce flooding. A clever combination of past, present and future.

A clever cottage garden where an old fashioned water well meets forward thinking rain garden design to slow and filter heavy rainfall. Look out for large pebbles that create an effective splash zone under a down pipe and lush, edible planting.

The frame of the garden is built using reclaimed pallet wood, with a piece of reused drainage pipe to collect rainwater.

The garden is layered with soil and gravel for drainage into the leaky pipe buried underneath. Water drains out the front of the garden through a small drainage pipe.

Plants including Swamp Milkweed, Golden Creeping Jenny and Loosestrife are planted along the front of the garden, with many other colourful flowers planted in reused yogurt pots hanging from the back of the pallet.

This Pocket Garden is a Rain Garden.  A rain garden is an area of plants designed to hold rainfall, then slowly release it, helping to reduce the severity of flooding.  Rain gardens filter the water naturally through their plants, soil and gravel. This filtered, clean water then flows more slowly to our rivers and streams. Any way of temporarily holding rain can be a rain garden, like a planter box that sits below a downpipe. Ideas about how to grow a rain garden can be found here.