Water gardens

My husband always wanted a water garden. In our pre-children days when we rented, he put a tiny fountain in a half-barrel, but it didn’t really satisfy him.

Within minutes of moving in here, he was scheming a “real” water garden.

It took about eight years for him to get to it. It was necessarily lower on the to-do list than re-piling the house, replacing weatherboards, remodelling the kitchen and bathroom, creating a third bedroom, and a host of other tasks.

And then when he started it, it took a lot of planning, digging, refilling, and digging again to get the basic structure right.

Then there were countless trips to the beach to collect the rocks to line it and complete the landscaping around it.

Then two years to kill off the twitch around it so he could even think about planting perennials there.

Add dozens of broken wine bottles in his attempts to create the little waterfalls coming down the hill toward the pond.

A solar pump to keep the water flowing, nine goldfish (now blossomed to a standing population somewhere around 40), two bridges, and a whole lot of plants, and it’s looking quite settled into place.

We all enjoy the garden. I could sit for hours watching the fish and the invertebrates in the water. The birds love to bathe in it, and the cat loves to prey on the birds bathing in it (he likes to drink from it too—must taste fishy). Herons come and snare fish, and the plovers hang out around it in springtime.

The pond garden has become something of a potager, too, with fruit trees, herbs, vegetables, and annual flowers nestled together with an eclectic mix of native and non-native perennials. A lovely change from the rank grass that filled the space for the first eight years we lived here!