Great Lakes Ecosystem Rain Garden Designs

Rain Garden Designs by RiverMaid Designs

These free rain garden plans are provided for you by RiverMaid Designs, a company that specializes in naturescaping, waterfront gardening, shade gardening with wildflowers, and rain gardens. We are fortunate that this designer loves our streams, rivers and lakes so much that she is willing to donate her considerable skills to Rain Gardens of West Michigan.

The lovely images on this page were taken in RiverMaid design rain gardens.

These rain gardens are laid out with color, balance, and bloom progression in mind, so you not only get a garden that helps you protect water quality on site, but a garden that will be lovely in every season, even winter.

Every garden on earth is site specific. You can adapt these gardens to your conditions, change or add a few plants creatively as you wish, double them, cut them in half, change the shape, or combine them if needed. They are provided as rectangles but can morphed to be any shape you desire. You can also plant them exactly as they are laid out.

Check back frequently for more free rain garden layouts. We intend to provide you with many fun, lovely and creative rain garden designs so that you will be able to find exactly what you are looking for--right here.

Tall Great Lakes Prairie Rain Garden

For Sun (6+ hours of sunlight) and clay soils.

Just as described, this garden is TALL. Some of the plants grow to ten or more feet! This is a spectacular, extravagant garden. The plants thrive in clay soils; by the time the plants mature, the root systems (60% of a prairie plant is those fantastic roots underground) will have grown deep into the clay and made the site more absorbant. Butterflies will frequent this garden. Do not trim the plants until the following spring, and the foliage will provide winter interest. Do not plant this garden next to a sidewalk unless you are prepared to stake them, because they may sprawl.

Tall Great Lakes Prairie Rain Garden  To download the PDF garden plan, right click on the link at left and choose "save as". Can't read PDF files? Click here to download free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Short Great Lakes Prairie Rain Garden

For Sun (6+ hours of sunlight) and clay soils.

This prairie garden is a little more tidy and well-behaved. Hummingbirds and butterflies will frequent this garden. This design features tight, closely-spaced blocks of color. The plants featured grow from 1-4 feet in height.

Short Great Lakes Prairie Rain Garden  To download the PDF garden plan, right click on the link at left and choose "save as."

Rain Garden Designs from Other Projects

Maplewood, Minnesota rain garden designs are available for PDF download on their site. The gardens are formal and mature, and they provide lovely images of them in bloom.

University of Wisconsin Extension Rain Garden Manual. This 32 page manual has a lot of good information, lovely formal rain garden designs, and some very grassy garden designs created by wetland mitigation specialists that might work best for larger institutional or industrial sites. It is in PDF format and can be downloaded to your computer.