WATERFEATURES...WHAT'S NEW...
RENOVATION and REPAIR to all sorts of features...Medium to Large GARDEN POND's, KOI POND's, STREAMS, WATERFALLS, ROCK GARDENS...and there's still more in the section below too...
Chapter TWO
HERTFORDSHIRE...great rock, but look beyond and you will see a very large pond almost covered in a mat of algae!
But now after the introduction of a massive water feature of ours to recirculate the water and add vital oxygen, plus lots of specialist plants...
And here's the result...water can be pumped from various parts of a pond this size, and poured back in over large waterfalls, thus creating healthy water, and of course, a great visual effect too...
Vital renovation for such an important focal point!
GLOUCESTERSHIRE...a really badly constructed "natural stream", as imaginative as a gutter...
Levels all wrong. Boring rocks just placed loose at the edges do nothing for it at all.
Even if you could get the water to the highest level all of that liner would be visible, and it leaked like a sieve...
And it ran down to the equally bad "natural" pond that you can just see in the distance...
And the remedy...well as nature does, dig a stream bed that's "wide and narrow, deep and shallow". Again as in nature...very interesting.
It's very important for something like this to work visually, which makes the digging out stage very complex. And to get the subtle detail, we almost always dig out by hand, Because what you dig, is what you are stuck with.
It's easy to dig this...
Which is why it looks as it does...
But to create something that will work (this IS the same stream) requires a lot of hand digging and a knowledge of how water moves, how much water a certain group of plants needs and being able to control that amount of water in different parts of the feature, purely by the volume of water that is flowing past, not by taps,valves and pipes.
Too much water and they will die, too little and they will die!
Now, this is very long feature and dozens of different planting areas have to be created, we build each area to trap the plants so that they don't invade and block the waterflow. And we build each area to allow just the right amount of water to enter that area...
And the pond itself...well it was a "POND RENOVATORS" dream.
Here's part of the finished effect, the rocks that you see in the foreground are within the liner and they are forming the front of a bog garden. Again created so that only enough water can get in. Interestingly you will see that nature has taken over and plants that like dry conditions appear to be growing with moisture loving plants. But they are actually outside the liner!
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