People

 Many people wonder what happened to the Water Lily nursery built up by Joseph Bory Latour Marliac  in Temple-sur-lot in South West France at the end of the 19th century. It has just recently been injected with a new lease of life and is once again selling plants, all over Europe, just as Marliac did himself.

Natural Swimming Ponds – A Guide for Building by Michael Littlewood. pub: Agri Media at £49.95 ISBN 978-3-86037-350-7

Do you like the idea of a swimming pool that is not full of harmful chemicals and keeps itself clean naturally, working in harmony with nature to give you the most blissful swimming experience you The experience of swimming in naturally clean water untainted by any chemicals or salt is an experience never to be forgottencould ever imagine? If it sounds a bit too much of an ideal and you are even having difficulty keeping your fish pond clear and not get all clogged up with algae or blanket weed then you will understand that the construction and planting of such a thing has to be somewhat special. To ensure clarity of water and sustainability, every aspect of the construction of the pool has to be exactly right. Although the initial overall concept sounds simple, to get it right, a lot of things have to be taken into account, done in the right order and in the end it all works out to be quite expensive. So the last thing you want is a cock up and for you to be uneffectively pouring money into a hole in the ground. The concept is new, but already there are a lot of people out there that claim to know all about it. Some are great craftsmen and deserve more work than they get. Others are complete charlatans and deserve to be ‘outed’.

So how are you going to tell what is the right way of going about making a swimming pond? If there are so many things to take into account, it must be possible to forget some things or leave out others that don’t get noticed until it is too late? That is very true and it is one of the problems that everyone who has a swimming pond up until now has had to face i.e. do the guys I’m employing know what they are doing and are they doing it right?

Well now for just a little less than £50 you have can have a bible, the veritable gospel according to Michael Littlewood – about Natural Swimming Pools. He has already produced one tome that has spread the word, a taster on the techniques, illustrating the possibilities. This was “Natural Swimming Pools” described as “inspiration for harmony with nature”- available from the Amazon store on this site. But now we have the manual  - not just a flimsy step-by-step instruction affair like you might get free with IKEA furniture kit. This is a serious hand-holding guide through the minefield of information and misinformation that blasts from all quarters. Believe you me, with this little honey you can take on all comers and lay it on the line as to how it has got to be done. That not only includes how it is going be, how much, what to order and in what order.

If there was ever an Aladdin's Cave for landscapers then Nailsea Patio
Supplies is it and John Marshall the owner is the Genie of the Lamp!

A tiny part of the vast array of hard landscaping products: The land on the horizon is another storage area mostly for natural stoneHere, between the A38 near Bristol and the M5 right next to Nailsea Railway Station, you’ll find all those impossible to find hard landscaping materials that you need in any quantity: paving, walling, both ‘recon’ and natural, brick, stone, slates, gravel to pebbles of every size from every corner of the country and mulching materials of every type and colour imaginable from shredded tyres to broken glass. And the prices? They are not design for the pick and mix hand scoop, we talk in tonnes and square metres here and the prices encourage you to buy in those sorts of quantities. There are ornament and containers, pergolas and archways. On top of that there is fencing, edging, sleepers (old and new), timber and the decking. There is proper top soil too and silver-sand for horticultural use; I haven’t seen that being sold by the ton for years. John even recycles old building products for use as hardcore or footings or fancy mulches. There is a lot of recycling going on here. Wait until you see some of the exotic mulches that seem straight out of an outré garden designers’ handbook with crushed and tumbled coloured glass,bricks, metal, rubber and most attractive of all, recycled toilet bowls!

Once in a while you come across a photograph that is not just an image. It is a work of art, because it is more than just the image. It makes you stop in your tracks and holds your attention in theWalter Rowe with his Nikon D200 same way as a painstakingly crafted painting. But this is just a picture of something caught at a moment in time by the press of a button, held by a recording instrument and mechanically reproduced. Yet despite that, here is a photograph that expresses more than the eye can see, because it is taken by a person with an eye to see and at a time when he or she realises the full expression of the subject can be caught. The equipment the photographer uses, and how it is set and set up are all important. But like the painter’s brush and palette these are just the tools of the trade and the techniques to attain the final vision.

There are just a few photographers who can do this. Many of them come from a fine art background. Only one or two seem to have been borne with a gift that enables them to express themselves and something about their subjects through the medium of the static image. One of them is Walter Rowe.

Walter Rowe photographs water lilies and rock bands. Think about that. What do they have in common? There are two things his water lily pictures do pack. They are the vibrancy of a song and the impact of a stadium performance. On top of that he can make water lilies look sexy!

To see what made such an artist tick, I asked him for an interview and I was really glad he accepted. And so here are the bones of that interview, with some of his tasty pictures just to make plant photographers everywhere green with envy: