Syme Hall Rain Garden

Syme Hall Rain Garden

Water Conveyance

A year or so ago a group of landscape architecture students led by NCSU landscape architecture assistant professor Andy Fox spent 10 weeks designing and building a rain garden to capture roof water and air condition condensate from nearby Syme Dormitory (on the NC State campus) and use it to water the garden they were installing.  The previous site was covered with brown mulch, had drainage problems and was not exactly an inspiring space. What resulted is a lush, plant covered garden with an open-air concrete water conveyance system with gravel filtration devices, capable of handling all the stormwater and slowly releasing it within the site.  The new plantings look to be drought tolerant. This project illustrates a sound design principle which is to accomplish a few objectives with one project: stormwater management, garden creation, and education, all in a small space.