12 Best Plants for Your Rain Garden

Rain garden perennials filter. Herbs, bushes, and grasses clean, nourish, and prevent flooding. River runoff is reduced by rain gardens near rooftops, roads, and streets. 

Rose mallow, often called swamp hibiscus, has 8-inch blossoms. Southern and eastern U.S. native, this thick perennial shrub.

1. Rose Mallow 

This perennial prairie grass is a major North American tallgrass prairie species. Its natural range is southern Canada to Mexico and much of the US east of the Rocky Mountains.

2. Switchgrass 

This lovely perennial wildflower with terminal spikes of huge red flowers. Most of the US is home to wild Lobelia in ditches, ravines, streambanks, and landscape depressions.

3. Cardinal Flower 

Humans and bees love buttonbush spike-ball blossoms. Beautiful and weird wetland wildflowers are hard to imagine. Buttonbush grows in eastern U.S. marshes, streams, and prairie swales. 

4. Buttonbush 

The tall, showy perennial produces beautiful rose-to-purple flowers easily. Swamp milkweed is a popular monarch butterfly host in rain and butterfly gardens. 

5. Swamp Milkweed 

A red-berried little tree will provide winter flair to your natural rain garden. Winterberry is a holly, however its leaves aren't pointy.

6. Winterberry 

This ornamental bunchgrass forms luxuriant, fine-leafed mounds. Known for its slender greenish-blue stems that grow to 5 feet and turn dark mahogany in fall. Winter-long white seed tufts are gorgeous. 

7. Little Bluestem 

This wild perennial grass' fibrous roots stabilize rain garden soil. This plant grows well in moderate shade and good drainage in midwestern and eastern U.S. forests and banks.

8. Virginia Wild Rye 

This natural deciduous shrub grows 5-10 feet tall in moist, well-drained soil. It grows wild along streams, ponds, and bogs and produces flat-topped white flowers butterflies and bees love.

9. Arrowwood Viburnum  

Monarda species, sometimes known as wild bee balm, benefit pollinators and are versatile. Wild bergamot likes damp soil and waterlogging as long as there is no standing water.

10. Wild Bergamot 

Why not use this wild aster in a low-lying drainage? Planting it for its vivid purple blossoms is popular. Strong roots and moist tolerance decrease soil erosion and maintain soil after big storms.

11. New England Aster 

Dogwoods grow as big shrubs to medium trees with four-petalled blooms. They like full light and moist, well-drained soil.

12. Dogwood  

Also See

Is Overhead Watering Bad For Plants?