A lush rain garden at Brookside Gardens and a future park renovation in the Evans Parkway neighborhood of Wheaton are some of the first projects in the country to test a new national rating system for landscapes.

"It's kind of like taking a test, if you get 100 points you get an ‘A,' and get certified to this level," said Phil Normandy, Brookside Gardens' project manager for the rain garden.

The rating system stems from the Sustainable Sites Initiative, a national cooperative among the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden.

Over the past year, the group selected roughly half of its 300 applicants to test the pilot rating system. The sites' planners will have a little more than a year to peruse the 230-page manual, participate in webinars about what they've learned and take the rating system for a test run.

For example, Brookside Garden planners will check off green initiatives they used to build their rain garden, such as re-using materials on the site, preserving existing soil and trees, improving storm water runoff, using native plants and increasing plant density.

The rating system allots up to 250 points for design, construction and maintenance of environmentally friendly landscape projects.

"This is basically LEED for landscapes," said Normandy, referring to the U.S. Green Building Council's internationally recognized rating system for environmentally friendly building design, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Landscape architects say LEED has done much in the past decade to improve society's mindset toward building sustainability, but it's almost entirely left out the landscape around those buildings.

"It really never had any components that related to the site itself," said Tricia McManus, the county's department of parks' supervisor for park design.

McManus is heading the renovation of a seven-acre park on Evans Parkway, which is currently in the design phase and slated to be completed by 2012. She and her team will try to rack up points in the rating system by incorporating such green initiatives as recycling the old park material (including steel and concrete), planting native plants and installing light-colored asphalt that reflects heat rather than absorbs it.

After the park is finished, they can continue to earn points by maintaining the site in environmentally friendly ways, such as avoiding power tools to clean the site. (That one may not be realistic, McManus said.)

Even with all of the extra steps to make the $3.6-million project green, McManus said it likely won't cost the county more money or time.

"We're doing a lot more work internally, but we're still staying on our initial schedule," she said.

Up the road at Brookside Gardens, where their $80,000 landscape was finished in the summer of 2008, Normandy and his colleagues are backtracking their construction process to see how many points they have earned. The garden was initiated by Ann English, who at the time was with the nonprofit Low Impact Development Center in Beltsville, to serve as an educational tool for how county residents who aren't landscape architects can build a rain garden. The garden features two large areas that are filled with permeable soil and native plants that effectively soak up rain water that would otherwise drizzle down into the garden's nearby streams.

"They don't just look at it as ‘Oh it's a storm water facility;' they just see it as a pretty garden, and then they want to learn more about it," English said.

County planners jumped at the chance to be a part of this national initiative early on because the parks department would eventually like to design every public landscape under such environmentally friendly guidelines, McManus said.

"Montgomery County is one of the most progressive counties in the nation," McManus said. " ... Sustainability is the way of the future, and it's part of our mission."