When you walk through the Muhlenberg College campus you will see beautiful brick buildings, green manicured lawns and athletic fields, trimmed landscapes and strategically placed trees. The landscape is well planned and cohesive throughout the entire campus. Yet, if you stumble along the parking lot between Walz and Taylor Halls you will instead find swaths of weed-like patches scattered along the sides of the pavement and next to the soccer fields.

“It’s the forgotten area” says Julia Low, ’19, “it just seems like Muhlenberg forgot about that area of campus.” With an entire campus of perfectly planned and planted landscape one must wonder how this corner of campus seemingly slipped through the cracks.

So, what are those weeds? Where did they come from?

To start, these weedy coverings were deliberately planted by Muhlenberg’s Plant Operations team. These patches are called rain gardens. Plant Operations, also responsible for the beautiful manicured campus via the meticulous Muhlenberg Landscape Design Guidelines, chose to implement these rain gardens into campus landscape. On Muhlenberg’s Office of Sustainability homepage, rain gardens are briefly mentioned as one of Muhlenberg’s sustainable initiatives. However, the true value and purpose of these gardens is not fully explained or justified. They were planted for a real purpose and reason.

Rain gardens are systems used for environmental protection and mitigation. When it rains, water runs off impervious surfaces, surfaces that water can’t readily absorb into concrete and asphalt. In parking lots, chemicals and oil from cars accumulates on the pavement. Then, when it rains, rainwater builds up on the impervious surfaces and washes these pollutants into storm drains entering nearby streams, rivers and, water bodies where these pollutants disturb wildlife and pollute our water.

In Muhlenberg’s case, these rain gardens are placed around the parking lot and soccer fields. Therefore, the gardens aren’t solely picking up and filtrating parking lot pollution but they can also keep fertilizers and pesticides from the manicured soccer fields from wreaking havoc on natural aquatic ecosystems. In addition, rain gardens can reduce the strain on our waste water systems that are not equipped to handle large amounts of water that accumulate in parking lots and walkways.

“These gardens collect, retain, and then slowly discharge the water, if needed, back into the ground.” says Brett Fulton, Assistant Director of Plant Operations. “The soil [in the rain gardens] was amended to allow for better water absorption, and the area was planted with plant material that favors wet ‘feet’. These plants will tolerate or even thrive with wet soil under them.”

They serve an important function in human altered environments by helping reduce the negative impact we have on our surroundings.

Despite the importance of these buffers and the plaques denoting and explaining the use of these spaces, campus knowledge about our leafy allies is severely low. Often, complaints can be heard about the appearance of the landscape in this area and most students have no idea what these rain gardens are or what their purpose is.

“They look kind of gross,” said Victoria Basciano, ‘20.

Another student, Alyssa Ahdieh ’20, expressed her confusion about the state of the landscape asking, “Why doesn’t anyone take care of it?”

However, Fulton mentioned how rain gardens are more attractive than alternative water retention methods.

“The college decided to use the rain garden approach rather than unattractive catch basins,” said Fulton.

Despite their appearance, it was evident that almost every student I spoke to didn’t have a clue to what purpose the rain gardens served on campus.

“We sit on a hill, so any run-off from paved areas, particularly parking lots, will make its way pretty quickly to Cedar Creek. Cedar Creek park is already prone to flooding, so anything we can do to minimize run-off is important,” said Karen Tuerk, Environmental Science Program Lecturer at Muhlenberg College.

On our campus, the gardens help to mitigate the problems we create ourselves.

“The gardens are used to control runoff. The roots hold the soil in place which reduces sediment and pollutant runoff,” says Dr. Jason Kelsey, Professor and Director of the Environmental Science Program at Muhlenberg College. “There’s value there and you can see why they were implemented.”

Creating awareness and drawing attention to the significance of rain gardens is essential; writing them off as ugly patches of grasses disconnects us from their purpose and the reason they’ve been placed where they are. Recognizing how rain gardens curb problems of stormwater runoff is an important step in understanding how humans’ negative impacts on land can be reduced.

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