Landscaping for Water Quality

Using particular types of designs and plants for landscaping can both protect your property from erosion and protect local waters. Landscaping for water quality is an approach that places less emphasis on uniform lawns and more emphasis on woody plants. It means maintaining the vegetation that already exists on your property and adding more shrubs and trees, particularly along stream banks and shorelines.

Use the information below to learn about how to landscape your property so that it looks great and helps protect and improve local waterways! To see examples of landscaping designs, visit the planting demonstration projects below.

Visit a Shoreline Landscaping Project

Visit a Streamside Landscaping Project

Visit a Rain Garden

Landscaping For Beauty & Water Quality

Replacing uniform lawns with landscaping can not only add value and beauty to your property, but it can also serve a purpose. Using landscape designs to benefit local water resources is good for everyone!

Landscaping can be used to screen out undesirable views, while framing good ones.

Woody plants, like trees and shrubs, can alleviate soil erosion. Preventing erosion reduces property loss, and formal repair costs, but it also decreases water turbidity. Did you know that many types of lake weeds, such as watermilfoil, thrive when sediments are washed into a lake?

Landscaping with native, perennial plants can reduce the amount of time and money spent on lawn maintenance, fertilizers, and garden chemicals.

Bands and strips of vegetation filter pollutants and soak up stormwater runoff. When rainwater passes through a garden or border of plants it slows down, allowing time for lawn chemicals, pet wastes, road salt, and other contaminants to be filtered out.

Landscaping with multiple types of plants provides a wider diversity of habitats for birds and wildlife.

"Landscaping for Water Quality" (pdf, 3.5 MB) This booklet provides ideas for property owners who want to create landscapes that protect and enhance nearby waterbodies.

Designing with the Right Plants

Before you can landscape your property, a number of criteria need to be taken into consideration. To help you develop your design, make a sketch of your property and evaluate the following:

Amount & direction of sun

Soil moisture

Soil pH

Problem areas

Views

Activities & access

Once you have evaluated your property, it is time to choose which plants will thrive there. You are more likely to be successful if you use plants that suit the site conditions instead of making the site fit the plant. Why choose high maintenance plants that will require excessive pampering? More and more people are discovering the beauty of using plants native to their area.

Native plant varieties are beautiful, and require less maintenance because they are well suited to local conditions. Gardening with native plants also helps preserve the character of the New York State landscape and the qualities that make it unique. Read “What Plants Do I Choose?” to learn more about native plants.

What is a Rain Garden?

Rain gardens look like regular gardens, but they are more. They are specifically designed to soak up rain water, mainly from rooftops, but also from driveways or patios. When it rains, the garden fills with a few inches of water and allows the water to soak into the ground rather than running off to the ditch or storm drain. Compared to a regular patch of lawn, a rain garden allows about 30% more water to soak into the ground! In addition to adding beauty and wildlife habitat to a landscape, rain gardens help recharge groundwater and protect nearby streams and lakes from stormwater pollution.

A number of brochures and plants list are available on the Water Publications Page describing how to design and construct a rain garden on a residential property.