Queens Botanical Garden 43-50 Main Street • Flushing, New York

The basic stormwater management concept at the Queens Botanical Garden is capture, cleanse, reuse in water features, cleaning, and toilet flushing, or infiltrate.  Rainwater is managed in a variety of ways in different parts of the site.  A new “parking garden” infiltrates rain in pervious paving plus “parking fingers” (islands) that biofilter and infiltrate; runoff from large rain events flows to a large rain garden. Surface runoff from the maintenance courtyard and other dirty areas requires more management: it is treated with a mechanical filter, runs through a biotope, is stored in a cistern, then reused for irrigation and cleaning machinery.  Roof runoff from the visitor center is addressed in two ways.  Rain falling on the auditorium roof is filtered and retained by a green roof; rain hitting the rest of the visitor center feeds a complex harvesting system: runoff falls from a scupper into a cleansing biotope (artificial shallow pond with vegetation and gravel substrate), then is stored in a cistern where ultraviolet radiation destroys bacteria. The processed rainwater is then pumped to a fountain at the edge of the Main Street entry plaza, which feeds a “stream” that flows back to the biotope at the visitor center, bringing the rain full circle.   Finally, the entire site drains toward a depressed central spine, recalling Mill Creek, that can hold up to a 100-year storm rainwater volume.