California Gardens - The Year Round Gardening Site

Bowl Fountain

A small water feature enhances any garden

I thought a few of our ideas on water garden design would be helpful in making your water garden a success. Water features don't necessarily require very much space. With a few mosquito fish there is never any risk of those pesky stinging insects.

All of this plant life and water gurgling comes in a 3 foot diameter concrete crock. The four-leaf clover is actually an aquatic fern called Marselia. There is a dwarf water lily buried in here but it never bloomed in this shaded location, the grassy looking plant is a Juncus patens. To get water filtration we pump the water through gravel and a bit of perforated flexible tubing. This amazed me for a long time but the water was always clear. I drilled a hole in this rock. The water sloshed around in the small basin in the rock and drained out through the bottom. I put in a few small fish to eat the mosquitoes. Many water plants don't appreciate splash and water movement but I wanted the water noise by my office door. This lasted about 3 years without having anything done to it until we got a new pup named Clover who thought it was her lucky day to have all this water just for her. She now has a pond of her own and this one is starting to grow back. The shallow water around the rock is great for bathing birds. Adding a water feature to your garden is a great way to attract wildlife to a garden, it brings the garden to life.

Crock pond - a small water garden in a concrete pot