I left you at the end of our last blog with a definite plan, and the first stage was to define the area. We decided we wanted quite a large curved area for the total pond and marginal area. The curved theme was established when we added the paths a couple of summers ago. Also, I love the feel in a garden that a curve pulls you into an area. Then, what to do with the tree? This tree when we first planted it was lovely – if you check back on the Willow. Pond. blog entry you will see it several years ago. Then slowly it deteriorated. A few years ago we cut off all the dead and it seems to have been making a comeback over the last year or two. This year, although really small, its better looking than it has ever been. So, we would include the tree within the gravelled area.
The last time we created our pond we built in small ledges to give different heights for the different plant types. But they didn’t go round the whole pond, and there weren’t enough of them. This time we remedied this. We started re-modelling the interior of the pond to include ledges that went round the whole pond.
At the end of the winter, when the hole in the ground was full of water we marked the top edge of the water with metal spikes. You may remember in my previous pond blog I mentioned that our other error when we created our last pond was that it wasn’t completely level. We used the metal spikes not just to mark the area of the pond, but also used a spirit level to set up a simple string guide to make sure that the pond was completely level.
Once we had the interior complete, out came the spirit level and each part of the pond was checked to make sure it was level, and that we had kept the level across the width and length. There was one addition to our team. Willow was still supervising, but this time she had an apprentice – a little Robin. There he was, every time we moved, waiting to pick up grubs and worms. Several times we had to stop and wait for him to finish what he was doing – well, that’s our excuse for taking a break, and we’re sticking to it.
Things started to get a wee bit panicky at this stage. We had expected that this part would take us most of the spring and summer. As we live in the north of Scotland we fully expected, to get rain, the pond to fill up and then have to wait for it to empty before we could get any further. But no, so far so good, no rain! BUT! Now we had a pond, no liner, and rain was forecast. Not a problem! Fishkeeper Scotland has a store in one of the local garden centres and they happily reserved a liner and underlay for us. Phew. Now all we had to do was visit Inverness and pick it up before the rain.
In the next blog I’ll cover the building of the pond and marginal area.