Ponds

INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

From an early age I was growing lettuces in a mixture of heavy clay and broken concrete, but I soon became fascinated by water and all the unfamiliar and strange things that live in it. My long-suffering parents tolerated an everincreasing number of holes appearing in their precious garden, filled with a variety of hastily constructed and poorly designed death traps in the guise of garden ponds. Slowly but surely, I began to understand why some ponds were successful and others not so much, and this learning process continues today. After achieving a degree in Zoology and a Masters in Fish Biology, I started a trout farm in Devon from scratch in 1982, while starting a popular sideline retailing aquatic plants, pond fish and pond accessories. In the winter months I constructed a wide variety of fishponds and garden ponds in connection with the expanding aquatic business. After selling the trout farm in the 1990s I moved to my current home in 2001, where I began to grow and sell aquatic plants by mail order under the name of Devon Pond Plants. This business has been tremendously successful, and I have learned a great deal more about what makes a pond work and how the different plants perform and grow. Through my website at devonpondplants.co.uk I have earned a reputation for straight talking and telling it how it is, and I will follow that strategy in this book. My aim is to cut out all the usual padding and concentrate on the main nuggets of information, adopting a practical rather than a theoretical approach. I will pass on some tips which have taken me many years to discover and share some insider knowledge which is hard to find for yourself.

Last year The Wildlife Aid Foundation embarked on its biggest ever life-changing project, part of which was to build three massive ponds for wildlife. Seeking specialist advice on aquatic planting, we reached out to David Kerr, who, after an initial consultation, quickly set about drawing up a very comprehensive plan for the design and planting of the area. His obvious knowledge and expertise left us in no doubt that we were in good and safe hands. What a breath of fresh air!

Simon Cowell, CEO of Wildlife Aid, and former presenter of Wildlife SOS.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

I hope that this book will allow the reader to leapfrog many of the errors commonly made and enable them to achieve success first time around. It is aimed at those with a reasonable level of practical ability and gardening knowledge, who nevertheless have limited experience of ponds and pond planting. It is therefore assumed that it is unnecessary to explain which tools will be necessary to dig a hole, or which way up a plant goes in the hole (green side up is a good general rule!). If you're the sort of person who needs to be told that they need a wheelbarrow and spade, and be shown a picture of these, this book may not be for you. In particular, contractors and garden designers with limited previous experience of aquatic planting may find it very useful.

The aim is to provide the detail lacking in other texts to enable the optimum planting in a pond to maximise its wildlife value and aesthetic appeal. It is not intended to cover aspects such as pumps and filters, waterfalls and fountains, hard landscaping details or fish keeping matters. A successful planting scheme depends in large part on good design, so there is a substantial section explaining the importance of careful construction before the planting is covered in detail. There is a long and detailed section on the plants which are most likely to be available in the UK, together with the growing requirements of each. Practical advice relating to propagation and pond maintenance is given, and at the end there is a chapter on common problems and how to deal with them.

Typha flowers.

I make no apologies for primarily using the Latin binomial names for plants to avoid confusion; common names are given where available. The Latin binomial is given in italics. Common names are interesting but confusing, for example horsetail is Equisetum whereas marestail is Hippuris. Water willow can be Persicaria or Justicia and willow moss is Fontinalis. Almost everyone calls the tall marginal plants topped by brown pokers 'bulrushes', however they are in fact reed mace (Typha). Bulrushes (Schoenoplectus) have tall tubular dark green pith-filled leaves and small spikes of brown flowers. (Rushes typically have tubular type leaves, whereas reeds have flattened leaves, but people often use the terms interchangeably.) Very many local names exist for native plants, and this can add to confusion. A dictionary of Latin to common names and vice versa can be found in the Appendices at the back of the book. There you will also find various useful information tables and contacts.

WATER IN THE LANDSCAPE

Water is not just an essential part of the landscape, or part of life. Water is life. Natural ponds do differ from manmade ones in many ways, but a well-constructed and planted artificial pond is a valuable addition to any garden or field. A garden or piece of land containing water is a magnet for wildlife and is infinitely richer than one without. Even within minutes of filling a new pond, insects will arrive to check it out, and that very night you can be sure that mammals will visit too. In nature, ponds are relatively short lived, geologically speaking, since they steadily fill up with sediment and plant material, morphing into bogs and heathland. They are therefore transient, and the animals and plants that inhabit them have evolved to be able to cope with variations in water levels and indeed to be able to survive periods of total drought, while taking the opportunity during flooding to colonise new areas. Along with this strategy of colonisation and endurance comes a tendency to be fast growing, tough and invasive, so many water plants are not suitable for smaller ponds at all and need to be used with care even in very large ponds if a total takeover is to be avoided. Ponds without plants are biologically poor, even though the water quality may be excellent. In nature these are the relatively rare oligotrophic, or nutrient-poor, mountain lakes and tarns, into which little organic material finds its way. Levels of nitrates and phosphates are low, which means that plants are starved of plant food, therefore insects are mostly absent and larger animals have no food and no place to hide and reproduce. In lowland areas the input from rivers and streams carrying a high load of organic material makes ponds eutrophic, or nutrient-rich. At its extreme end this can mean that decomposition of this material produces toxic gases and other compounds which exclude the possibility of life. This is why woodland ponds are often problematic - the large quantity of fallen leaves can blanket the pond base and poison the water - but in open unwooded areas it means that there is an explosion of fast-growing plants. This in turn means that the pond rapidly silts up with organic material produced by and trapped by the plants, and in no time at all there is no pond at all, just an area of dense reedbed and marsh.

Water in the landscape.

Dragonfly on an iris bud.

Pond reverting to bog.

The principal difference between a natural pond and most artificial ones is that the former is connected hydraulically to ground water and there is a seamless progression from wet to dry at the edges, since there is no liner. This usually makes for a more variable water level, and it does not guarantee that the pond will not dry out completely when the ground water level drops. However, even if a geotextile liner is used, as typically on ponds over 200m2, the pond itself is cut off from the ground water and cannot be replenished from this source. On a hot summer's day, a shallow lined pond could drop as much as 5cm from evaporation and transpiration, but ground water levels are unlikely to drop that fast, so in this way a lined pond is less stable than a natural one. In the case of on-stream ponds of course the water level will be more or less constant unless the stream dries up completely.

Progression of wetness at the margins.

In hot Middle Eastern countries, the value of water is perhaps understandably appreciated more highly, and cool oases with fountains and moving water have been a feature of wealthy homes for many hundreds of years, but in Great Britain, the interest in incorporating largescale artificial water features into private estates and gardens really only began fairly recently, with landscape architects such as Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, Gertrude Jekyll, Beth Chatto and the like. Few aquatic plants have a long history of cultivation and those that do are mostly those with practical uses such as thatching reed (Phragmites communis) or lotus, every part of which can be eaten in tropical or subtropical countries. The relatively low effort spent on developing new varieties of pond plants, coupled with the short history of water gardening, means that the range of commercially available aquatic plants is quite small when compared with the panoply of ordinary garden plants, and when this is combined with the need to avoid many undesirable species, it doesn't leave a vast number of possibilities for planting. A few species, such as Caltha palustris (kingcup or marsh marigold), could be considered to be almost essential, but for most smaller ponds on a garden scale, the range of suitable plants is quite small. It is therefore vital to select the right ones and give these plants the best...