New rain gardens, native plants, heritage vegetable gardens and rain barrels have been added to the Captain Salem Avery Museum grounds to create the Heritage Eco Tour. Visitors will be able to see how the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society is working to be a good steward of the rivers and Chesapeake Bay by following the Heritage Eco Tour around the Museum grounds. The tour will also educate the visitor on how to add rain gardens and rain barrels to their own property.

The 2009 rains and neighborhood flooding began a Board of Trustees attempt to solve a flooding problem and to pay attention to protecting the Chesapeake Bay. Heavy rains often flooded the section that is now a garden, making access to the historic house and grounds difficult and sending unfiltered rainwater from our own and adjacent properties pouring through the culvert directly into the West River.

Gail Schneider, Board Member and Chair of the Going Green Committee, provided the leadership to complete this project. Jinnie Siever, former Board Member, co-chaired the effort.

The Chesapeake Bay Trust awarded the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society a $21,570 grant to construct a storm water management plan, intended to also become a model water filtration project for the community and all of the thousands of visitors the Museum hosts annually. Rain barrels, rain gardens (bio-retention cells), native plants, and a heritage vegetable garden will demonstrate careful living on the Bay. The goal of this project is to divert as much water as possible away from the Bay and into the gardens where new native plants will thrive. Remaining water that does reach the West River will be cleaner as a result of the natural process of filtering through the soil levels.

Greenstreet Gardens partnered with the Museum in this project providing about $8,000 worth of native plants and shrubs for the rain gardens. Professionals designing and, additionally, contributing volunteer hours to the new additions were Anne Guillette, Low Impact Design Studio, and Mel Wilkins, EcoGardens, LLC. Doug Sanner, Eden Contracting, supervised the creation of the rain gardens. Volunteers planted the nearly 800 plants.

Visitors to the Captain Salem Avery Museum will receive a brochure for the self-guided Heritage Eco Tour. The brochure was funded by a $2500 mini-grant from Four Rivers Heritage Area. Plant identifying tags and plants for the vegetable garden are being funded by a $1,000 grant from Unity Gardens. Rain barrels were painted by Muddy Creek Artist Guild artists. Girl Scout Troop 148 developed and planted the Heritage Vegetable Garden. The West-Rhode Riverkeeper was a consultant in the development of the design.

The Museum rain gardens will be a demonstration bio-retention site for South Anne Arundel County. The Heritage Eco Tour will allow visitors to learn about South County history and the transformations that have made life on the Bay today so different from earlier times. Using the Museum grounds and its history as a lens, the Museum’s new Heritage Eco Tour demonstrates how to become good stewards of the Chesapeake Bay and to restore the Bay, as much as possible, to its once bountiful state.

The Completed Rain Garden

Before the Rain Garden