Water Garden Style

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.

Pond and rockeries at DewstowFrom information and photographs supplied by John Harris

A lost garden has been discovered in South Wales and after six years of painstaking excavation and renovation has been opened to the public. What is unusual about this particular garden is that much of it is underground. Tunnels and underground grottoes were buried under thousands of tons of soil for over 50 years. Built around 1895 the gardens were buried just after World War II and rediscovered in 2000 by the present owner John Harris and his family.

When things are nice and simple, and the ground is firm and flat, the easiest way put in a flexible liner is the standard conservationist technique and is only suitable for informal water gardens. This little article could easily have a heading:

How to Build Ponds in the 'Continental Fashion'

The reason this method is so popular is because it doesn't involve any construction at all. All you need is a good strong spade and back for digging, some pegs (longer than the intended depth of the pond), the corect amount of liner and underlay and a good quantity of soft heavy sand (Holme sand).

As the water garden plant life withers in the gloomy short days of our long winter and an icy grip draws a veil over the whole scene, many of us are already yearning to be back amongst the bounteous activity that surrounds a water garden in early summer. An expensive winter holiday in a tropical paradise in the southern hemisphere can bring temporary respite but on return things only seem worse. Now you want to have a piece of that tropical paradise closer to home.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU DO, IT’S THE WAY THAT YOU DO IT

As any teenager will tell you, if you want to be accepted as fashionable or stylish (as in ‘with it’ – in past parlance), you need to do more than just dress up in the latest gear and parade about. You really need to think, be and breath life into the image that you are trying to create.

The same applies to style from another culture and not just in the fashion that affects clothing, but in all artistic endeavours that involves personal expression, which definitely includes garden and landscape design.