A new 3,000-square-foot rain garden in Scarsdale, N.Y., has been added to a local park to decrease flooding events in the area. The installation includes a permeable paver walkway, more than 30 species of native plants and a six-foot-deep, 815,000-gallon capacity water basin.

A corner of Cooper Green Park, across from the local police station in Scarsdale, N.Y., has been transformed by a stormwater management project into a 3,000-square-foot rain garden with 1,000 new trees and shrubs.

The new rain garden is one piece of a $3.1 million project to reduce flooding in the Fox Meadow Brook watershed, a "sub-watershed" of the Bronx River. A newly installed six-foot-deep basin beyond the rain garden will hold up to 815,000 gallons of water.

The rain garden, added in an otherwise-unused corner of the park, is dotted with more than 30 species of native plants, including dogwoods that flowered this spring, and hydrangea and roses that will bloom during the summer.

"What this rain garden is going to do is help purify and filter the stormwater as it comes through here before it ends up in the basin," deputy village manager Stephen Pappalardo told The Journal News.

A permeable walkway also lets water pass directly into the ground.

"The idea is to capture water during intense storm events, hold it back and then slowly release it over time to help mitigate flooding downstream," said Robert DeGiorgio, vice president of D&B Engineers and Architects of White Plains, engineers on the project.

Another part of the stormwater project, a 2.3 million-gallon basin, was installed at George Field Park, north of Cooper Green. A final segment yet to be started near the local high school at Harcourt Woods will stabilize a stream bank and reroute stormwater flow.

The Village of Scarsdale is paying for half the project, with a grant from Westchester County funding the rest. The project has been in the works since 2009, and was necessary because of repeat flooding of homes in the area, Pappalardo said.