Fish ponds. Formal or informal ... pond keeping with style

Its like chickens and eggs with outdoor ponds and pools; every person that keeps fish will at sometime keep fish in a pond or pool outdoors. If he or she doesn’t then I bet they wished they could. Now I’ve come across some pretty dedicated fish keepers in my time, particularly when I was doing a talk tour of South Africa.

Here I met people for whom fish was the pole star around which their whole universe revolved.

Their piscine charges were their pride and joy, and the whole of their gardens and houses would be filled with vast containers for fish and the thrumming technology of pipes, pumps and filters. It’s not that they didn’t care that all the mechanics of the water management were on view, in fact it was on display!

Like the ‘Hotrods’ of the 60s and 70s with those big sparkling engines, they were saying: “Look what this dude has packed in to make this meanest mutha of a machine that really does the bis, man!”

It was a measure of the seriousness to which they were involved and how in touch they were with the latest gizmos.

Now not everyone is so dedicated to their hobby that they are committed to it to the exclusion of everything else, and there are of course other people to consider who might have other ideas about what the garden should be used for.

There is also a certain approach, once common in this country, which gives the impression that everything looks straight forward and even simple from the outside, where as the mechanics or equipment, as complex as they maybe, would be neatly hidden away. This lends the scheme, especially if you are dealing with water gardens or water features in general, an air of magic, and if done with style creates a focal point for the whole garden.

Style in water gardening

Esewhere I have introduced you to the Japanese garden style, which can be a ‘garden consuming’ passion in its own right and a perfect style to set off Koi carp. But it may be that you haven’t even yet decided how big it going to be and where it will be yet, let alone whether your pool is going to be even formal or informal shape.

Well, formal ponds or pools tend to be closer to the house or linked or within a formal setting for instance in a separate ‘garden room’.

Formality in a garden can mean more to us now than it did 100 years ago. Originally, classical formal gardens had a strict geometrical layout that was mirrored each side of a central axis. This was an essential prerequisite for perfection and harmony.

Water could feature centrally on the axis or in the mirrored compartments. The size and layout and rules of proportion for the formal garden layout should have corresponded to the proportions of the house. Therefore the size of water feature would correspondingly relate to the pattern in which it sat, although many of the grandest schemes related more to the importance, wealth, power or ego of the owner of the house.

For the full appreciation of a large garden laid out in true classical formality, you need to be able to view from a high point.

Nowadays the idea of symmetry even in formal gardens is not considered essential or even desirable. Instead designers talk about balance and form. For areas of formal paving or geometric pieces or lawn or planted beds, units that correspond either to the house, or to an obvious feature of the house like the patio doors or the size of the big windows.

These are used to make up a pattern of areas, all with different textures, at different heights, or containing different levels of structure like shrubs. Water is an ideal element in this, making a reflective surface that brings light and a mirror to the ground surface. Not only that, sound can be added that will mask noise like traffic and the surface can be animated with a cascade or a fountain.

In this way a formal pool can be a focal point quite some way from the house and be used to draw you towards it, but it needs to be linked to the house with these units of geometrical shapes or a formal path.

The "hard" cost of water garden landscaping

Formality in large measure equals, what we call, ‘hard landscaping’; this means hard materials like stone, brick, and gravel put in place with the correct footings and preparation. Even the cheapest materials need a relatively large amount of labour to install them properly ... In fact if you are going to the expense of a lot of hard landscaping and you are having it done for you, it can be false economy in opting for cheap materials, since once you get the bill for the labour, you would hardly notice that bit extra on the slabs or stonework.

What formality also requires is planning, and many of us are not very inclined to forward planning. We fly through our lives fairly whimsically, choosing many of the things we bring home on impulse. Its how garden centres make most of their money.

Material question for landscaping water gardens

The choice between a good preformed pond ‘off the shelf’ and a good flexible liner is down to the design or style you had in mind. At pence per square foot of material, there is very little to choose between them. There are not many formal shapes to choose from, but for the informal look, there is generally one that fits into the ‘minds-eye-view’ of your future pond. If your project is still of a fairly whimsical nature, you see a shape you like on the racks and you are desperate to see the project through, despite everyone telling you to plan it properly, then the preformed is probably the safer bet. You can take it home and try to see how it fits or looks in different parts of the garden.

The fish are not really going to notice the difference. You will find thought that these huge looking pools on their racks in the garden centres look quite diminutive once installed in the ground.

Not only that, if you had chosen an informal shape, it seems virtually impossible to try to make the preformed plastic pool look like anything else than what it is; a great sheet of non-biodegradable plastic in a hole in the ground. A flexible liner can be used in a variety of ways ....

A flexible liner can fit any allotted space. Mark out your pool shape on the ground and measure it. Add double the depth to the width and the length and go out a buy it off the roll.

If you use a flexible liner to line your pool excavation, stone or paving placed around the top-level edge seems to sit much more comfortably and can be cemented much more effectively into place.

You can face the inside of the pool with rockery stone or building stone , have a beach, or as wide a planted area as you want that will great with a bog garden backdrop. And what’s more, the pool can be a big as you want and any shape. The garden is your oyster.

Budget obviously is going be a major factor in all the decisions you make in regard to your pool or water garden. If it is going to be a permanent installation that will be a major presence in the garden then the materials that you use for lining it need to be of a durable nature and of a quality that reflects the seriousness of the project. So I would say for pools say larger than 15 square metres, you want the most durable materials: either EPDM rubber or Butyl or the most ultra-violet resistant PVC that has a minimum 20year guarantee.

Informal water garden ponds are preferred

Most people seem to lump for the informal approach, its only natural! In effect a natural pool is a little world that is self-sufficient and self-sustaining, it a fascinating eyeball on nature that can be viewed at any time and you don’t even have to turn it on.

For gardeners, it is another habitat for plants to grow in, creating a microclimate around itself that has an invigorating effect on all the plants near it. In other words it is not only a visual focal point, it is a centre attraction to a myriad of plants and animals.

For this reason the garden needs look as though it wants to nestle around it with plants from all four corners to get a look at the action. A backdrop of evergreens helps for the winter as long as they dont detract from the available sunshine.
It needs full sun to work properly and should kept away from the leaf fall of trees in general but especially the likes of yew, oak, elder and willow. I would say that it is probably best that it is at least partially visible from the house, since for the six months of the year you don’t get out into the garden, you wont see it.

Also for safety’s sake: about a dozen children a year a drowned in domestic ponds, and they are generally little boys, ranging in age from about 18months to 3years. But most importantly, they are quite often other peoples’ kids visiting, with or without permission.

Reason for the water feature's existence

Now unless this feature is going to contain some art or artefact like an ornament, it still needs a purpose to be there. The fact that it is the dampest boggiest part of the garden is n good pond precisely for that reason. The dampest place in the garden is to where nitrates and phosphates runoff, and the water table after every rainstorm has the power to come up under the pool liner to giving the impression of a school of visiting Hump-backed whales.

As a landscaper I found that a piece of casually planted machinery or hewn stone created the right balance of purpose and romance.

A piece of old pump, a trough, even a piece old pillar would be just enough to get the imagination going on what this pool may be a relic of perhaps a mill?

Watering hole for farm animals? An old bathing pool? A bit of boat. It needs to be something that relates to your district. If there is a waterfall and or a stream then it can quite easily be a rock pool at the end of a mountain stream.

The water garden's functional comprise

But life need not be all either or. There is the classic British compromise that gives you everything and something else beside. On the edge of your formal patio area, nothing seems to make a better boundary or introduction to the more informal part of the garden than a pool.

The patio works as a perfect edge viewing area into the wilder elements of the garden. The far side can be rustic or rockery, with streams, waterfall or whatever the imagination devises.

If you have a decking area as an edging to a pool, it hardly intrudes on even the wildest pools or ponds. A place that man hovers in Olympian luxury, at the same time observing the busy mêlée in nature within arms reach.

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