Category Archives: pond

The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn’t even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium – although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is – of course! this is my garden! – a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha…. now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I’m not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank’s current occupants – mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns – under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I’m hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I’m thinking x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

Ice fishing

08 Friday Jan 2010

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Every morning I set off down the frozen garden with a saucepan of steaming, bubbling water in my hand, to do a little pond maintenance.

Not having had pond fish before – we created this little fishpond late last summer – this is something of a new experience for me. Breaking the ice can apparently kill goldfish (something to do with sound waves travelling more easily through water, so it sounds something like a bomb going off which in a two-foot pond would make anyone keel over in shock), so melting it is the only way, however silly you look. Actually, it makes me feel a bit like one of those Eskimos crouching on the snow keeping the fishing hole open. Though I don’t suppose they do it by watching a saucepan slowly capsizing into the water beneath.

All this hard work is for the benefit of Peanut and Mango, who have not been seen since about November. I’m hoping they’re tucked away under the slab we thoughtfully propped across two of the shelves in the pre-fabbed liner, snoozing away the winter (hibernation is beginning to seem unduly attractive by this stage in winter, I find, though I’d probably prefer not to do it in near-freezing water). I’m trying to resist the urge to drop a fishing line in there to find out how they are.

The irises and that fluffy grassy stuff – I think it’s Eriophorum angustifolium, aka cotton grass – are fine, and the waterlily died down well before the big freeze so I assume is also happily hibernating. But the water hyacinths have had it and are frozen in brown, semi-decayed death halfway in and out of the ice as I forgot to lift them and put them in a bucket in a frost-free greenhouse like I was meant to some time back in October.

Now I can’t remove them as they’re part of the icy scenery, and I’m just hoping they won’t have turned the water stagnant before it all defrosts again. My heart is in my mouth every day lest Peanut and Mango should one day be found to have joined them in icy suspension floating on the surface: but so far, so good.

Netting niggles

29 Thursday Oct 2009

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Is it my imagination, or are the leaves coming down faster this autumn?

We’ve had a week or so of brilliant colour, and now it’s like a wall of yellow confetti. I can’t help feeling a little cheated: autumn is my second-favourite season (after spring, of course, silly) – something to do with the sudden onslaught of colour on senses bleached by the white light of summer.

But onto more prosaic subjects: each autumn I get into trouble. This is because I net my pond, a job I carried out about a week or so ago using a roll of reasonably small-gauge plastic netting I use every year. I weight this down with bricks to keep it taut and work the occasional length of wood underneath to keep it clear of the water.

Trouble is, my uber-wildlife-friendly friend tells me this is absolutely not what you should do if you want to be nice to nature. As of course I do: this is after all meant to be a wildlife pond. She says I’m trapping all the lickle creatures in the water so they can’t get out. She gets a bit more fuzzy about what exactly happens then: after all, I said to her, I surely would have found rafts of drowned newts floating on the surface in spring if it really was a problem.

I say they can find their way out through the gaps (alongside, for example, the bricks) if they need to, and besides, it would do the wildlife a whole lot more harm if I let all the leaves fall in and rot into a stinking and stagnant mess on the bottom.

So who’s right? Since we’ve reached something of an impasse I thought I’d hand it over to those who know more about these things than I do. Has anyone out there got any light they’d like to shed on the matter? Any intensive research studies on the winter habits of pondlife and the effect thereof of plastic netting I should know about?

All authoritative conclusions gratefully received…

How we spent our weekend #3

05 Monday Oct 2009

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A bit of an update on the fishpond’s progress…

As so often seems to happen, we’ve done it all arse before elbow, having been a bit distracted by a sudden rush of hard landscaping in the last week or two. Things were rather brought to a head by the precipitate arrival of the fishies, which came from my mum’s pond where they were surplus to requirements. They couldn’t stay in the plastic storage box we’d brought them back from Wiltshire in, so I made an emergency dash to our local specialist aquatic centre for some greenery to make them feel at home.

At the risk of having a bit of a Colborn here, there was b***** all to choose from. It’s not like we only went to one, either: we’d already visited a mockery of a “specialist aquatic centre” on the way home from my mum’s, to find half a bench of sickly looking specimens riddled with shepherd’s purse and a tank full of dead waterlilies.

On to my local “aquatic centre”, and it was much the same story: badly-kept, ill-cared-for, tragic-looking plants which obviously played a poor second fiddle to the fish – particularly koi, for some reason that always escapes me – and to the manly-looking aquatic gadgets, pumps, bits of moulded plastic masquerading as fountains and other large and preferably electrically-operated paraphernalia. I couldn’t find a single waterlily I wanted to buy instead of put mercifully to sleep, so eventually I despatched my father-in-law, who lives in London, around every nursery in the city until he found a disease- and weed-free Nymphaea pygmaea (for very small ponds).

I know it’s probably not peak time for buying water plants, but all the same, that’s no excuse for such a messy and shoddy display. If you’re going to run your plant stock down, take the wretched things away from the sales benches: I’d rather see empty shelves than that sorry collection of cruelty cases.

It doesn’t have to be this way. One beacon – if a lonely one – of excellence which puts plants first and does them well is Waterside Nursery, a regular at the RHS shows. Its plants are multitudinous and beautiful, sometimes unusual, spectacularly well-cared for.

Sadly it’s in Leicestershire, around 100 miles from my front door: great for mail order, but if you’re being as disorganised as us, a bit of a detour. In the meantime we have to put up with these excuses for plant sellers. Why the aquatic industry short-changes us so badly on plants, when so many people adore their ponds, I cannot understand.

Anyway. By the way, there’s no picture of the fishies (who are called Peanut and Mango, for reasons best known to my 7- and 9-year-old), who have been given a nice rock for shelter and are consequently almost always under it. But I managed to snap the water snail, who is – equally inexplicably – known as Banana Corkscrew.


He’s doing a great job of eating all the algae so far, though I rather suspect him of doing an equally good job of eating the waterlily leaves. I just hope he (she? it?) doesn’t start multiplying, that’s all…

How we spent our weekend #2

28 Friday Aug 2009

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A little update on progress with the fishpond…

This is the Bloke’s department – far too much precision involved for ditzy old me. The slabs are a sort of mellow limestone left over from a landscaping project on a far posher house than ours – hubby was the carpenter so he came home with a pile of this really rather lovely, though somewhat brittle paving. Since it did crack so easily I was fretting about how to use it – heavy-duty pathways and the like were entirely out of the question – but it turns out it’s a shoo-in for crazy paving.

One sticking point, if you’ll excuse the pun, was the cement: I simply cannot figure out how you’re supposed to lay paving around a pond to hide the edges of the liner without getting cement in the water. This is obviously A Bad Thing as it poisons fish (and no doubt sundry other wriggly things) but absolutely impossible to avoid. In the end we stopped worrying about it too much and simply re-cleaned the pond at the end of the operation.

The finished product: after clearing up those left-over slabs it’ll be the tidiest thing in our garden. Next step is the bog garden and a lot of plant shopping. Now that is my department.

How we spent our weekend #1

19 Wednesday Aug 2009

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Have small children clamouring for goldfish and pathological hatred of cleaning out fishtanks…

will dig big hole.

Having drawn some interesting but perhaps not shareable conclusions about our domestic soil profile, we added the preformed liner donated by the in-laws (also pestered by said small children. Someone give them something to do – four of the six weeks of summer holidays have been survived but we’re getting desperate.)

In a very clever way (mainly because we looked it up on the internet first) we made the hole about 2″ deeper than the pond to allow for a layer of sand at the bottom. This was a blessing – the base of the Big Hole was like a particularly stony brand of concrete (see reference to soil profile above) so there was no way we were going to get this baby level without introducing some leeway.


Half-filled to stabilise it and it’s looking good – the water is even lining up with those ledge things quite nicely so I guess that means The Bloke can use a spirit level after all. Actually he did most of this, but since he had his shirt off at the time I’m reserving the evidence for my eyes only. We did line up a lot of wheelbarrows (very small ones for the little people) and move dirt. And I got down in the hole with my girlie border spade and shovelled out the bottom bits (to much praise over my digging technique from mud-phobic husband: you see there was a reason for all that gardening, after all).
There’s a clue to what we did next in the last picture. This was the technical bit so I withdrew to a safe distance and watched admiringly. Of which more later.

The great thaw begins

12 Monday Jan 2009

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Walking down the garden drops of melted hoarfrost are falling from the trees, and for the first time in three weeks, there is water on my pond.


It’s still three-quarters frozen, and all pond-life is suspended just beneath the surface like a snapshot of the moment before the cold snap began: this water soldier (Stratiodes aloides) is meant to have sunk to the bottom for its winter sleep but it obviously didn’t get away in time.


My pond is a little shallow so I’m hoping all the newts are still OK in there.

I may be getting optimistic here but who knows – I may even get gardening again soon!

School lessons

01 Wednesday Oct 2008

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I mentioned some time ago that I’d taken over the school garden.

Well, in the way of these things, shortly after I took it on, they started building work which meant not only was everything on hold for more than a year, but also we lost half the garden before we’d even started.

You take these things on the chin, though, and in fact it’s all worked out OK in the end since now the work has finished, I know where we are and we can go forward. I got all inspired by the Dorset Cereals Edible Playground garden that won Hampton Court this year, and between me and various teachers and parents who should really know better, we’ve come up with a big and rather exciting scheme for developing a new space for the kids to grow lots of food in.

So before we started I thought I’d record what state it’s in at the moment – neglected in places, presentable-ish in others, but in need of a lot of work, hopefully from people large and small.

This is the wildlife pond – weedy, unkempt, and recently much larger. The bit on the other side of the picket fence is tarmac now, but it used to be garden. Never mind: there are plenty of bits left to have fun with, including a raised bed, a soon-to-be herb bed and a bog garden, as well as sundry weed-infested borders which once cleared will be open to inspiration.

This is the (somewhat neglected and overgrown) Millennium Garden – can you see why?

And these are the raised beds along the front of the school itself. Currently planted with a hotch-potch of different plants, and not in too bad a state, but one talented mum has now come up with a design involving box balls, a lot of alliums, some Geranium ‘Rozeanne’ and a few prostrate rosemaries, which will hopefully pull this lot together and make it look pretty good for most of the year. This is our first project – I’m going shopping next week if the PSA give me the green light.


Finally – the bit everyone’s getting excited about. All the kids in the school, from 4-year-olds in reception to the big girls and boys in Year 6, are being given a design project in which they’re going to be asked to come up with loads of imaginative designs, from which we’ll select as much inspiration as we can cram in without making it too overcrowded. From this we’ll create our Kitchen Garden. The hedge behind it (a mixed wildlife hedge around the pond) is coming down by about half, which is a huge job for November, but I’m trying not to think about that too much: instead looking forward to lots of colourful drawings and some seriously good ideas!

Ducking and diving

05 Friday Sep 2008

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This stuff is causing me a right headache at the moment.

I’ve never owned a pond that hasn’t suffered with duckweed – quite a pretty weed, as weeds go, but nonetheless a weed. It is utterly prolific: I fished out every last dot a week ago, until we had clear water, and just look at it again.

The trouble is they get caught in just about everything, from waterlilies to bits of liner, and so there’s no way you can hope to get them all out. Just one or two left in a little cranny somewhere, and you’re condemned to another fishing expedition a week later.

The silver lining is that because it virtually covers the water’s surface in our rather under-planted little pond, we never have problems with green water or algae as it simply out-competes it. I still wish we had more plants and less duckweed though…

Trimming to size

27 Friday Apr 2007

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Back to the monster mahonia again yesterday – I came to the conclusion that I’d see what happened after I’d done some restorative pruning (i.e. thinning out the very congested centre, removing crossing branches and so on).

Luckily that did take the height down a bit and what with a few judicious cuts which removed the remainder of the really tall bits, I managed to take about 5ft off the top without actually changing the shape of the tree much. I also had a lot of fun climbing about in the canopy – it doesn’t take much to get me up clambering about in trees!

Result is a happy client – he got his view back – and happy me, having preserved a very special plant. I’ve revised my opinion of mahonias and will be recommending them as an unusual architectural plant to designers – but as 20ft trees, not the modest little specimens you see in most gardens.

One other thing – I have for my sins agreed to take over running the garden at my local primary school. Why is it we gardeners are such suckers for co-opting more things to grow and spaces to grow them in? Hopefully I can delegate a lot of the work to other parents – but I have to confess, I’m secretly quite excited about this little pond area they have there, which I plan to make into a fantastic little wildlife garden. Minibeast heaven. More later…