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Plants to Aid Flood Prevention

Now that we are well into Autumn and inching towards Winter, the weather is getting progressively gloomier and wetter. With this influx of rainy weather, we wanted to share some gardening and landscaping tips that will help with flood prevention in your garden. We wanted to highlight specific plants and garden designs that would be effective in ensuring your garden would not be significantly damaged should a flood occur.

How to Plant for Flood Prevention

Having a range of plants throughout your garden will help filter into the ground rather than pooling on the surface. What this means is that the more plants you have around your garden there will be more areas for water to be absorbed, lessening the chance of a flood occurring or causing too much damage.

Some of the water evaporates on the leaves and don’t fall to the ground. This may sound farfetched but is an effective way to aid in flood prevention. As we have mentioned before, having varied plants around your garden will only benefit your garden during floods – but when choosing your plants make sure that you choose ones with large leaves or good absorption abilities. If the leaves are larger, they will be able to collect more raindrops before they land on the ground, and oftentimes the collected water evaporates and never makes it down. This does have an impact on the level of water that is hitting the ground in your garden as it works as a buffer between the falling rain and the ground.

High-nutrient soils are a vital part of ensuring that your plants properly absorb the rainwater. You need to make sure that you have laid high-nutrient, top-quality soil in your garden to ensure that they have the ability to absorb a good amount of the rainwater so it doesn’t collect on your garden surface. Stone Zone are proud supplier of a wide collection of soils ranging from Beds and borders, Peat-Free, Lawn and turf and more – catering to all kinds of garden types and sizes.

Planting a variety of plants around your garden is the simplest and easiest way to make sure that you are safeguarding your garden from rainwater and flooding. The wider the variety you are able to plant, the better it will be as not all plants have the same water absorption qualities.

Best Plants to Aid Flood Prevention

There are several plants that have a high absorption rate that will help with flood prevention. We have collated a small list to help you get started:

Winterberries

Giant Rhubarb

Granny’s Nightcap

Japanese Iris

Primrose

Landscaping Design Ideas for Flood Prevention & Protection

There are many ways you can design your garden to ensure that it’s protected from flood damage. We have some simple ideas that you can implement when designing or refurbishing your own garden.

A straightforward way to avoid flooding in your garden is to make sure that there are some areas within the landscape that are not paved. This is due to the fact that water pools and gathers in paved areas, and even porous pavers such as Sandstone and Limestone, are not fast-absorbing enough to prevent heavy rainfall and flooding. Therefore, if you have areas with plant beds and soils, that will fare much better against flooding than paving slabs.

If you also want to take extra steps to ensure more of your sensitive or dainty plants are protected, consider building raised plant beds with wooden sleepers so they are above the ground and will hopefully be unreachable from the water.

Another way to protect potted plants in particular is to ensure that the pots have sufficient drainage holes in them so when water goes in, they won’t be trapped and oversaturate your plants but flow out naturally.

 Alternative Flood Prevention Methods

 If you want more options for preventing flooding in your garden, we have some more ideas that are different from using plants and natural elements.

If you have checked the forecast and are aware that there will be rain in the near future a good idea would be to place some water butts and gutters (several if you can) to collect the rainwater so this way, not only will you be protecting your garden from getting flooded, you will also have fresh water that you can use for other garden gardening tasks.

 Furthermore, if you have a shed in your garden, you can line it with weed membrane or other garden fabric and create a border with timber for a border which is then filled with soil. This is a great idea if you want to take up a small project that is both unique and effective to aid flood prevention.

Finally, you can build yourself a rain garden. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a rain garden is a shallow area on the ground, and it essentially gathers all the water that flows down from roofs and other high surfaces when it’s raining. You can fill these indents with water-absorbing plants to create a small garden or several around your landscaping. They are easy to maintain and are immensely useful when it’s raining.