No more garden flooding! Drainage case study update
Back in January, we blogged about garden drainage and specifically mentioned two projects where drainage was a key ‘challenge’ (and that’s putting it mildly!). Now the gardens are complete, we thought you might like to see some photos of how things turned out…
Crowthorne
This garden is situated at the bottom of a dip in the surrounding area, and alongside a small stream. The garden has always tended to get quite wet after heavy rainfall and during the excessive rain before and after last Christmas, the garage floor was submerged under 50-200mm of water. Our client had to make frantic efforts to prevent water entering the house.
The solution involved installing a mini sewage pumping station underneath a gravel path that winds its way across the garden. We also regraded the soil before returfing the lawn, so that the rain now runs down gently from all sides towards the path and hidden pumping solution.
The rain is then pumped off to the side of the garden, under the new raised patio, and from there is fed out into the little stream that runs along the side of the garden. We have subsequently prepared a planting plan for all the new borders, and will be supplying and planting the plants in September / October.
Despite copious amounts of rain falling since installing the new system, the garden has not flooded since. Our clients are certainly sleeping much more peacefully now!!
Lower Earley
The other garden we mentioned was a small back garden at a considerably lower level than the houses beyond (perhaps 2-3m lower). Also a tiny bit lower than the gardens either side.
Here, as well as installing extensive gulley drains, connected to a huge new soakaway, we went on to install a permanent, gravity-fed pumping system. Permanent pipework was installed under the garage floor, allowing water to be pumped out to the rain water pipes and storm drainage at the front of the property.
The Result
These two projects serve to show that with careful planning (and also the ability to adapt and modify plans as a project develops), flood-prone gardens can be dealt with! We hope that our years of experience of planning for a wide variety of constraints has given us a can-do attitude, where problems are there to be solved, not walked away from!
The result? Two happy clients with happy, flood-free gardens!