talking about ponds

I spent today thinking about ponds.  I am due to talk to a garden club about them, since I was talking to them about something else, and they asked whether I knew anybody who could speak on ponds.  I didn't, but then thought that there probably wasn't anybody who particularly specialised in them locally, and offered to do it myself.  After all, we have two ponds, a Writtle course taught by a couple of the better tutors covered them, and I had the resources of an extensive gardening library and the whole of the internet, and time to prepare.  But the time is now ticking away, and it felt like the right point to start crystallising my thoughts.  Besides, it was freezing outside and my feet are still sore from yesterday's walking about (I will know next time to wear socks as well as thick tights with those boots).

It has struck me since agreeing to do this talk how out of fashion ponds are in the gardening magazines.  Sometimes featured gardens have ponds, but they only ever appear in the photographs. There is almost nothing in the text, ever, about pond maintenance, let alone reviews of pond plants.  When to cut down the stalks of the New Perennial plantings, yes, or how the topiary is clipped, but nothing at all about how you stop the water in those corten steel tanks from turning into green soup.

Fashions in water gardening certainly change, that's another thing that's apparent from reading through a couple of books dating from the mid 1980s, and contrasting them with what's featured at Chelsea in the past decade.  Remember the kidney shaped pool?  Ever consider building one now? Ponds thirty years ago were Arts and Crafts inspired or else Italianate, or amoebic if you wanted to be contemporary.  Where you found a pond you were highly likely to encounter crazy paving as well, and probably a rockery if it were a modern suburban pond rather than Lutyens' finest.  Leaf through Gardens Illustrated and The English Garden now, and if it is a recently created garden rather than an Edwardian restoration you will probably see rusted metal tanks, black stone and infinity edges.

There is actually a lot to be said for installing a tank above ground level, perhaps balanced aesthetically by corresponding blocks of clipped evergreens.  The earth coming out of any hole in the ground mysteriously expands to many times the volume of the hole, and finding somewhere to put all of it is a pain in the neck.  Getting the edges of a hole absolutely dead level is another, and if they are out by even an inch it will be massively visible, and you will have to resort to all sorts of subterfuges to camouflage that telltale strip of liner.  A nice simple tank, prefabricated off-site, that you could always empty and adjust if it ever slumped from the exactly horizontal, could save a lot of bother all round.

The best magazine for giving advice on pond management is the RHS, by a long chalk, and they run regular short features on what you should be doing.  Once a pond is up and running the answer is generally, not very much.  Deal with dead vegetation and fallen leaves in the autumn, the best time for planting is the spring, a big clear out if needed is best done in the autumn but shouldn't be an annual event.  But the RHS seems to have absolutely and implicitly assumed that anybody who wants a pond intends to manage it for maximum wildlife benefit, and only offers advice on managing wildlife ponds.  It is quite interesting to know that pond filters and pumps destroy the tiny organisms on which dragonfly larvae feed and are therefore best avoided, but how do you stop the water in your trendy tank filling with a rich crop of algae, in the absence of shading plants or submerged oxygenators?  And how exactly do you use that black dye that gives a mirror pond effect?

The orthodoxy on using rainwater in preference to tap water is now practically hysterical.  Tap water contains pollutants which once they enter a pond are very difficult to eradicate.  It does what?  They're talking about stuff which is regularly tested and judged fit for human beings to drink, for goodness sake.  It contains chlorine, which evaporates off after a while.  OK, it also contains very low levels of nitrates, but in levels that will wreck the potential ecology of a pond? What about stuff that dissolves in the pond out of the atmosphere?  And how does the advice to use only rainwater for fear of introducing unmanageable levels of nutrients square with the advice that waterlilies are gross feeders and need to be given sachets of plant food in their compost, or home made nutritional balls of clay and bonemeal?

One of my psychology tutors said that people were incapable of concentrating for more than three quarters of an hour, and gave us a mid lecture break accordingly.  Garden club talks shouldn't last more than forty-five minutes to an hour, as after that the audience wants their tea, or their suffering spines can't sit in their village hall seats any longer.  On that basis I should be fine, as I already have over an hour's worth of material.  There are still some gaps, but they say that the best way of learning a subject is to teach it.