How To Landscape Your Garden Pond

Garden ponds have become an increasingly popular feature in recent years, and this is no surprise at all, they are lovely to look at, add interest to a garden and they also help local wildlife. So, if you are thinking about having a garden pond installed, you will need a few tips on how to landscape garden ponds.

Take Your Time

The process of landscaping garden ponds will require a little careful planning to ensure that you get the best possible end result. Before you start to build your pond you will ideally need to find out more about them and how they can be of benefit to your garden, so don’t be tempted to rush the process, take time for planning.

Attracting Wildlife

A garden pond is usually built with the purpose of attracting wildlife to a garden i.e.. insects, birds, amphibians and other animals. However, in order to do this, you will need to ensure that landscape garden ponds are as natural as possible in appearance. Many people will make the mistake of building a garden pond that looks very artificial, although this can mean that it looks reasonably OK aesthetically-speaking, wildlife may not be attracted to it. Therefore, when you are formulating your landscape garden pond plans, you will need to make sure that you stick to a few basic landscaping rules.

Choose The Right Depth

The first thing to understand is that a garden pond does not need to be very deep - this is a very common misconception. To get the best result, a garden pond needs to have a good variation of different depths throughout, with the shallowest parts of the pond (the edges) being no more than 5 cm and the deepest part being around 75 to 80 cm deep. Ideally, the pond should have graduated shelves that formulate an easy path from the shallowest end of the pond to the deepest part.

Create The Bed

To get your garden pond project underway, you will need to create the ‘bed’. You will need to choose a spot in your garden that generally has equal amounts of sun and shade throughout the day. Try to avoid building garden ponds under trees or bushes, if you do this you may end up spending a lot of time removing leaves and twigs from the pond.

Once you have dug a sufficiently sized hole for the pond, you will need to fill it with a liner. If you don’t use a liner, the water will simply seep back through the soil when the pond is filled. Butyl rubber is highly recommended for this purpose, it can be a little more expensive than cheaper versions of pond lining, but it is very durable so will last for many years.

Underwater Plants

Once you have placed your liner in your pond, you may want to put in a few underwater plants – they can add a bit more interest to the area and help to attract more wildlife. Now it’s time to fill your pond; it is very important that you don’t use fresh water for this job, always use water from a real pond or lake, as this kind of water will contain microorganisms that are needed to help bring new life into your pond. Many people make the mistake of using tap water and then wonder why wildlife avoid their pond!

Around three to four bottles of water from a real pond will be sufficient to get your pond started. Over time you will find that insects, birds, amphibians and other animals will naturally migrate to your pond, so sit back and enjoy the fruit of your labour!