Beautiful Plants For Your Interior
Do you have a tricky runoff or erosion spot on your property, or a spot that stays pretty wet? Do you wish there was a way to make it look really good AND solve your problems? A rain garden might be the perfect solution. If you’ve been wondering how to build a rain garden the right way, I’m hosting a free event at our new Culpeper landscape design home where you can watch it happen.
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Our Culpeper shop’s rain garden build event – March 2025
Right now my target date for this build event is Saturday, March 15th. That may be subject to change if the grant funding doesn’t come through right away so be sure to sign up for more details below. As soon as we have everything in place we’ll send out invitations to everyone who signed up.
Location:
Revolutionary Gardens
16184 Brandy Road
Unit C
Culpeper VA 22701
Schedule of Events
8 am – walkthrough of the rain garden excavation. We’ll get the rain garden dug out the day before so you can see what the cross section looks like in real life. We’ll start installing the underpipe and soil media so you can see how that all looks.
9 am – Rain garden basics workshop
1030 am – Native plants for rain gardens
12 pm – lunch
1 pm – check-in on the rain garden progress
2 pm – TBD
More information is coming so sign up below to get on the list!
How our Culpeper rain garden idea came about
We started moving into our new Culpeper landscape design HQ in September of 2024. Right off the bat one thing was clear: this was a challenging property! Behind my shop is an open field with a very slight slope towards a creek. The soil is a wet, sticky clay that holds water like my cat holds a catnip mouse – aggressively and unyieldingly.
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I knew from before I signed the lease that I wanted to install a patio/outdoor classroom and display gardens. When that three week period of continuous rain hit last fall I quickly realized that the area behind my back wall was good for one thing: a rain garden.
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The process of planning a rain garden
The first thing I did was reach out to my local Soil and Water Conservation District to see what grants were available. They came out to look at the site and they confirmed what I thought about rain garden placement. Once they emailed over the runoff calculations and rain garden details I was off an running.
This is the plan! The total rain garden area is roughly 1100 square feet. Depending on the final construction details, the spreadsheet provided by the soil and water district says we need somewhere between 450 and 750 sq ft of rain garden. A bigger rain garden means more plants so why not?
I designed a 20 ft x 20 ft patio for use as an outdoor classroom. Because we’re not the only tenant on a parcel zoned for industrial use, I designed plantings to help screen the neighbors.
I’m excited for what’s to come. If you want to see it all happen, make sure you fill out the form above!