Flower power is back.

At least in Kansas City, Mo., it is. Leaders in the neighboring metropolitan area are spending a lot of time these days growing an idea that uses flowers to combat the oftentimes expensive problems related to stormwater flooding.

Where engineers once would have immediately begun drawing up plans for concrete culverts or channels to whisk water away, thought now is being given to specially designed flower gardens that will suck up water, store it in the ground and even filter out some pollutants.

“There’s a shift in thinking going on,” said Scott Cahail, environmental manager with the city’s water services department. “We’re beginning to realize that how we’ve been doing things isn’t always the answer. More concrete isn’t the answer. Speeding up the flow of water isn’t always the answer. Sometimes that just contributes to the flooding problems.”

The key to the new strategy is native plants. Many plants known to pioneers settling the area are great at sucking up large amounts of rainwater because they have deep roots. With a bit of minor shaping of the soil, “rain gardens” can be created to allow water from downspouts or steep slopes to pool in a person’s yard and be absorbed by the plants instead of running into a storm sewer on the street.

“Instead of creating ways to rush water off our property, we’re encouraging people to value it as a resource and keep it on their property,” Cahail said.

Applied Ecological Services in Eudora is helping officials in Kansas City, Mo., with a project dubbed 10,000 Rain Gardens. The effort encourages residents to plant flowers and native plants to combat the oftentimes expensive problems related to stormwater flooding. Dylan Quigley 24, left, and Jason Dremsa, 26, work on a landscaping project for the company.

Kansas City has adopted the idea more so than any other major metropolitan area in the country, Cahail said. Metro leaders in November launched an initiative dubbed 10,000 Rain Gardens, urging citizens, businesses and fellow governments to build 10,000 of the special gardens over the next several years.

Over the last several weeks, the city has been running television and radio ads promoting the initiative. The idea seems to have piqued the interest of Kansas Citians, said Ted Hartsig, a manager with Eudora’s Applied Ecological Services, which is working as a consultant on the KC project.

“The response in Kansas City is overwhelming, and I really do mean overwhelming,” Hartsig said. “We’re being contacted by three or four people per day who want us to come and talk to a group.”

The initiative’s Web site – www.rainkc.com – has had 22,000 hits in the last month, and more than 200 area landscapers have signed up for classes on how to build rain gardens.

Hartsig said he thought rain gardens would start popping up around the city this spring.

“Once you show people that this isn’t about using weeds, they really begin to realize some of the benefits,” Hartsig said. “They can be pretty maintenance-free and aesthetic.”

The plants generally don’t need additional water and usually don’t require fertilizer. But they do produce a garden that looks different than traditional beds of manicured flowers. The native plants look more like the grasses you’d expect to find in a prairie, but many of them flower in the summer and glisten against the snow and frost of winter.

Lawrence leaders plan to keep an eye on what their next-door neighbors are up to. Mayor Boog Highberger said the city needed to be open to alternative stormwater solutions because traditional forms of dealing with runoff could be costly. City Manager Mike Wildgen agreed, but said he would be particularly interested in seeing how the rain gardens cut down on Kansas City’s need for curbs, gutters and other traditional stormwater projects.

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“I’m not sure there’s really any information on how they will work in a large system like that, but it is an interesting idea,” Wildgen said.

The right thing?

Kansas City leaders are interested in seeing whether the gardens can save them money. Cahail said the idea for the rain garden initiative came as planners were grappling with ways to get stormwater efficiently moving through pipes and culverts strained by growth and age.

“We looked at it and saw that it was going to cost us an arm and a leg,” Cahail said.

But the jury is still out on whether the rain garden idea will do much to reduce the need to resize and rebuild portions of the city’s stormwater system. It is not expected to eliminate the need to improve existing infrastructure, but it could cut down on the need for some projects. That is part of what Applied Ecological Services is trying to determine.

“One rain garden won’t make a difference,” Hartsig said. “But if a lot of people – say if even one in four people did it – it could have a tremendous impact.”

The company, which has been operating out of Eudora for about two years, is developing a cost benefit analysis but doesn’t yet have the results.

And Hartsig said there were some reasons beyond pure dollars and cents to adopt the garden concept. He said today’s stormwater system often created problems by eroding stream banks or creating flooding in other areas of a community.

“Today you build a concrete channel, and that just increases the velocity of the water,” Hartsig said. “It just moves the water downstream and makes it someone else’s problem.”