We provide water garden
design, installation, and consultation.
There are a lot
of reasons to have a water garden. My first excuse to build a water
garden at my house was because I
wanted to grow some water plants. It doesn't require
much water to float a few plants. A tub or basin that holds water is
enough for many plants. There are a slew of aquatic plants that can float on an inch of
water or less or love to be in a bog or un-drained container. Water noise to block out the
sounds of the traffic and neighbors attracted me. A stream seemed
like a challenge. But once I made one I was rewarded by the
increased bird-life that was attracted to the water. My enthusiasm was fueled
so when I got a chance I built a pond for someone else.
Finding reasons for water features beyond their simple beauty has been
easy. Surprisingly they have not been that difficult to construct.
Water evaporates from
ponds at about the same
rate that it transpires from a lawn. This makes a good argument for putting in a
water garden or another great excuse for minimizing the area taken up by turf.
Most folks are quite satisfied with a much smaller pond than they would be
for size of their lawn. The impact of the pond is just so much
greater than for an equal area of sod. The sound
of water can be great for masking traffic or industrial noise. The
water noise
produced is a white noise that people find calming. Maybe it is also due to all of
those extra negative ions floating about. The practitioners of Feng Shuei have found
importance in the specific placement of water in the landscape for centuries.
Whether the project requires a lake or just a small basin, water brings a coolness and
visually arresting focal point into a landscape. By using a pump, either in or out
of the water, noise, splash and the sparkle of moving water becomes a part of the
landscape. Fish and plants can be a part of the water garden as well. I am not
fond of adding chlorine to the water. Fish and plants won't tolerate it. I
would rather set up a small ecosystem that can be fairly self supporting. Algae will
grow. Barley straw can help a lot with the string algae but does not
stop it entirely. Think of the algae as the weeds of this section of the garden. I will tolerate
a little and pull out the rest. I started my first pond so that I could have
lilies and other water plants. Most of my garden endeavors have been inspired by the plants
that I can grow if I only had perfectly drained soil for an alpine bed, or a wet zone for
bog plants or in this case a basin where lilies, lotus and other aquatic plants would
thrive. It is important to keep the fish population down to a level that the water can
cleanse itself or you have to add lots of expensive equipment, uv lights,
filtration tanks etc . . . The natural way that this is accomplished is through the actions of
bacteria on every surface exposed to the water and the absorption of the nutrients by the
plants. In order to have more, or larger, fish more filtration must take
place. This can be accomplished by moving the water past a greater amount of
filtering materials. I usually do this on the intake side of the pump but have set
up systems that just transport the water from one side of a pond to the other and filter
at both ends to maximize the water filtration. The bacteria population
is dramatically increased by the water movement. Their population
will crash if the water is turned of for even as little as 4 hours.
So I try to set up the ponds to run continuously. It is important to
keep water from running into a pond. The surface water picks up
nutrients and organic material and adds it to the water. It is
difficult to balance a pond when this occurs.
California
natives for your water feature: Mimulus
cardinalis, Lobelia
cardinalis, Carex
tumicola
