Coe College Rain Garden

In late fall 2011, Culver's Landscaping constructed the first rain garden on Coe College's campus.  The rain garden, which is located north of Hickok Hall, is designed to divert runoff from Hickok's roof from the storm sewer and instead let it infiltrate to groundwater.  In addition, the site will be instrumented to allow Coe students and faculty to collect data on the flow of water into the rain garden, the water level within it, and the movement of soil moisture through the profile.  The rain garden will serve as a model for others interested in installing such a feature and will provide data for student and faculty researchers.

For more information about Coe's rain garden, click on the links in the sidebar to the left.

The creation and instrumentation of the garden was funded by the senior gift of the Coe class of 2008 and  a Community Partnership grant from the Cedar Rapids Linn County Solid Waste Agency.  In-kind support also came from Culver's Landscape, Amy Bouska (Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship), Jon Gallagher (Linn County Soil and Water Conservation District), and Dr. Mary Skopec (Iowa Geological Survey Bureau-Iowa Department of Natural Resources).

News

• Keith Schilling, research geologist from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, gave a presentation at Coe on February 23, 2012, titled "Do we have increased flooding potential in Iowa's river systems"?  You can view his slides here.
• Marty St. Clair gave a presentation on the Coe rain garden to AGN300, Rain Gardens and Bioretention Cells, at Kirkwood Community College on October 25, 2012.  The course is taught by Wayne Peterson, coordinator of IDALS Urban Conservation program.  You can view the slides here.
• Instruments have all been installed, and they indicate that the rain garden can easily handle a fairly hard one inch rain with no surface ponding.