Rain pg 1 10-27-11
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- Category: Past Issues
Arboretum, Town Hall,
maybe park will benefit
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
WOODSTOCK --- After the installation of a rain garden, the Palmer Arboretum will keep its ankles drier and the watershed will benefit from a "purification filter."
Jean Pillo, watershed conservation coordinator of the Eastern Connecticut Conservation District (ECCD) said a federal Environmental Protection Clean Water Act grant, administered through the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, will be used to manage and filter stormwater in three locations in Woodstock, including the Palmer Memorial Hall/Arboretum, the Woodstock Town Hall and possibly Roseland Park, using "rain gardens."
"We hope that the projects will inspire people to build rain gardens," she said. Rain gardens are used for stormwater management. Pillo said "a rain garden is a garden planted in a shallow depression and designed to collect and infiltrate stormwater into the ground. The soil and plant material in the garden act as a water filter and the garden is designed to encourage stormwater to percolate into the ground where it can recharge aquifers or resurface elsewhere as springs. It is groundwater that supplies cool, purified water to streams when there is no rain."
Bill Brower, chairman of the arboretum's board, said the creation of the rain garden will keep rainwater overflow from jumping the curb and flowing down hill into the arboretum, taking soil and plants with it.
Pillo said there's been discussion about fixing the overflow problem for 10 years.
The ECCD is partnering with the town of Woodstock and with the Woodstock Historical Society to install a rain garden at the border of the Palmer Arboretum. The arboretum is behind the Palmer Memorial Hall, the historical society's home. At the back right corner of the parking lot of the property, there is a storm drain that is often overwhelmed with rainwater draining off the roof top and the pavement. Pillo said "the overflows goes through the arboretum, picking up soil and nutrients on its way down the hill." The arboretum is in a drainage basin, or watershed, that drains to Roseland Lake and that flows into Little River, a source of drinking water in Putnam.
David Faist Engineering of Southbridge and Kim Kelly, former Windham County Master Gardener coordinator, donated their services to the project. The garden is also being supported by the historical society, Pillo said, in memory of Doug Zimmerman, a long-time member of the society who died suddenly in 2010.
Plans call for digging up 8 to 10 feet of the parking lot to replace the compacted soil around the existing storm drain with sand, compost and topsoil and then creating an underdrain below that, with gravel. The 6-inch pipe in the current drain cannot be replaced because the roots of nearby cypress trees are too close. If there are heavy rains, that underdrain will direct the water through the "rain garden" to a second new storm drain on the left back corner of the parking lot. A small retention basin will be built slightly downhill, near the west gate of the arboretum, to handle any additional water. Between the two storm drains there will be plantings complementary to the roses along the parking lot border that will filter stormwater.
The parking lot will be more efficiently laid out, too.
Pillo said "our hope" is to get the storm drain infrastructures at the arboretum and at the Woodstock Town Hall done before the ground freezes this season. In the spring, the plant materials for the garden portions of the projects would be installed.