Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape Hardcover – April 15, 2007

As some of you may know, the LEED building rating system focuses on 6 key areas: Sustainable site development (SS), water savings/efficiency (WE), energy & atmosphere (EA), materials and resource (MR), indoor environmental quality (IEQ), and innovations & design process (ID)."Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape" is a very useful book on water savings/efficiency (WE). It described various ways of caturing, channeling, diverting and re-using water from rain and snow, including permeable paving, storm-water chains, bioretention ponds and green roofs. Rain gardens create great environment for wild life. They are visually pleasant, economical and sustainable. I live very close to several of the retention ponds of my local water district. They are fine examples of rain gardens, I always love to visit them and see the beautiful birds and plants in or near the retention ponds. Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden described many of the techniques that are used by my local water district. These techniques are unconventional and can be useful all over the world. They can effectively capture the storm water and let the water settle and clean itself through the natural process and save it for drought period, instead of using concrete-paved flood channel to rush the storm water to the ocean."Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape" has 188 pages and many line drawings and beautiful interior color photos. It is a great book on sustainable design.Gang Chen, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Author of “Planting Design Illustrated,” “LEED GA Exam Guide,” “Architectural Practice Simplified,” and other books on various LEED exams, architecture, and landscape architecture