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    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home
    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home
    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home
    Ebook451 pages5 hours

    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home

    By Editors of Creative Homeowner

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    About this ebook

    How to design and create water gardens, ponds, and fountains. Over 490 color photographs and illustrations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCreative Homeowner
    Release dateApr 1, 2017
    ISBN9781607654377
    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home
    Author

    Editors of Creative Homeowner

    Consumers recognize Creative Homeowner as their leading and trusted source for the best information, inspiration, and instruction related to the house and home. Creative Homeowner is the preeminent publisher of books on all aspects of decorating and design; home repair and improvement; house plans; gardening and landscaping; and grilling. Creative Homeowner's books stand out from other publications with their complete and easy-to-follow instructions, up-to-date information, and extensive use of color photography. Among its best-selling titles are Ultimate Guide to Home Repair and Improvement, Updated Edition; Ultimate Guide: Plumbing, 4th Updated Edition; and Ultimate Guide: Wiring, 8th Updated Edition.

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    • 5/5
      Excellent information presented in an easy to access format with lots of pictures to illustrate key concepts.
    • 4/5
      I liked it, but unfortunately, text wrapping is pretty unusual at recommended plants.

    Book preview

    Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home - Editors of Creative Homeowner

    Introduction

    Adding a water feature to your yard or garden will reward you with endless hours of delight. If you’re willing to invest the time, Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home can be your guide to a beautiful water garden of your own creation.

    Of all the things you could add to your landscape, a water feature has to be the most dramatic. What else could bring you sound, movement, reflections, and the opportunity to attract animals and use plants in entirely new ways? This book has been organized to both inspire you and provide practical, hands-on guidance.

    Chapter 1 takes you on a historical tour of water gardening, where you’ll probably discover that your motivation for building a pond or fountain isn’t much different from those of the Moguls or Roman rulers of many hundreds of years ago. You won’t be able to copy the scope of most of these grand designs, but you will realize that you are indeed in very distinguished company. Chapter 2 talks about design considerations: where you will put your pond, how you will shape it, and how you will make it seem an integral part of the rest of your landscape. Thoughtful consideration of these factors, along with detailed knowledge of your soil, sun, wind, and weather, will ensure that your water feature brings you, your family, and visitors delight for many years to come.

    illustration

    A traditional Japanese garden may inspire you to adapt one or two elements and incorporate them into your own design.

    Then you move on to the nuts and bolts of installing your new pond. Chapter 3 discusses the things you will need to build your pond and explains how to put pen to paper in planning it. Your pond’s foundation, like that of your home, is the basis for all that will come later, so all of Chapter 4 is devoted to explaining what must be done to install it correctly. Thanks to modern technology that has made flexible liners and preformed shells affordable for everyone, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to do.

    Once you have the foundation in place, you will find numerous options for adding frills. Chapters 5 through 7 describe fountains and lighting, bridges and steppingstones, waterfalls and streams, and how you can add these features to your design.

    If you have a naturally wet area in your landscape or if you enjoy collecting and growing unusual plants, you’ll want to spend time reading Chapter 8. This chapter talks about bog gardens, which are often installed adjacent to a pond. This is where you can grow fascinating wetland denizens such as the carnivorous pitcher plants and Venus-flytrap or the terrestrial orchid called ladies-tresses.

    Chapter 9 explains factors that affect the quality of your pond’s water, which can mean life or death to your fish and make a difference in the way your water looks or smells. Chapter 10 is about the creatures themselves, from expensive collector koi to predators who might stalk them.

    As a rule, water gardening brings pleasure far outweighing the work and expense it entails. Yet you do need to anticipate problems and do some periodic preventive maintenance. Chapter 11 goes over the few seasonal tasks you should carry out to keep your pond and its residents healthy.

    Chapter 12 is the heart of the book. Sure, you can have a pond without any plants at all, but for most of us these features are water gardens. So this chapter is an encyclopedia of plants, from underwater oxygenators and water lilies to native wetland plants that look at home near a pond or stream. Choosing and arranging these plants will make your pond new to you every year.

    Water gardening has something for everyone. If you’re mechanically inclined, you may want to experiment with various sized pumps and filters. Artists will devote their time to shaping a stream, edged with perennials to bloom throughout the seasons. Nature lovers will plan and plant carefully to attract birds or even raccoons and snakes. Whatever your inclination, this book will help to get you off to a solid start on a fascinating hobby.

    illustration

    There’s no better inspiration than nature. You can create a naturalistic look for your pond using freeform shapes, plantings, and stones.

    Hardiness Zone Map

    illustration

    The Hardiness-Zone Map developed by the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA divides the country into 13 zones according to average minimum winter temperatures. Hardiness zones are used to identify regions to which plants are suited based on their cold tolerance, which is what hardiness means. Many factors, such as elevation and moisture level, come into play when determining whether a plant is suitable for your region. Local climates may vary from what is shown on this map. Contact your local Cooperative Extension Service for recommendations for your area. Or go to www.planthardiness.ars.usda.gov to find your hardiness zone based on your zip code. Mapping by the PRISM Climate Group, Oregon State University.

    AHS Heat-Zone Map

    illustration

    The American Horticultural Society Heat-Zone Map divides the United States into 12 zones based on the average annual number of days a region’s temperatures climb above 86°F (30°C), the temperature at which the cellular proteins of plants begin to experience injury. Introduced in 1998, the AHS Heat-Zone Map holds significance, especially for gardeners in southern and transitional zones. Nurseries, growers, and other plant sources will gradually begin listing both cold hardiness and heat tolerance zones for plants, including grass plants. Using the USDA Plant Hardiness map, which can help determine a plant’s cold tolerance, and the AHS Heat-Zone Map, gardeners will be able to safely choose plants that tolerate their region’s lowest and highest temperatures.

    Canada’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map

    illustration

    Canada’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map outlines the different zones in Canada where various types of trees, shrubs, and flowers will most likely survive. It is based on the average climatic conditions of each area. The hardiness map is divided into nine major zones: the harshest is 0 and the mildest is 8. Relatively few plants are suited to zone 0. Subzones (e.g., 4a or 4b, 5a or 5b) are also noted in the map legend. These subzones are most familiar to Canadian gardeners. Some significant local factors, such as micro-topography, amount of shelter, and subtle local variations in snow cover, are too small to be captured on the map. Year-to-year variations in weather and gardening techniques can also have a significant impact on plant survival in any particular location.

    illustration

    PART 1

    Starting with a Plan

    What inspired you to want to create a water garden or pond? Was it a feature you saw and admired at a friend’s home, or did your inspiration come from something on a grander scale—a fountain, perhaps, in a public park or a photograph of a historic water garden? Whatever it was, enhancing your garden with a water feature will bring you many hours of delight. But first, you have to have a plan.

    CHAPTER 1

    Looking to the Past for Inspiration

    From the beginning, human beings have venerated water. We know it as the sustainer of life and sense it as the source of our origins. Yet because it also holds fear for us, we need to control it. The earliest recorded water gardens reflect all of these things: the practical need for water to drink and to cleanse oneself, the necessity to irrigate life-sustaining crops, the desire for a sense of coolness and for comforting sounds in harsh surroundings, a need to control nature, and in many religious traditions, connection with the Creator.

    illustration

    This is where water gardens began—in the Cradle of Civilization, located between the Taurus Moutains of eastern Asia Minor and the Persian Gulf.

    illustration

    Fountains Abbey, in North Yorkshire, England, is the remains of a medieval Cistercian monastery.

    Early Civilizations

    The Cradle of Civilization was the birthplace of water gardens. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, which extended from the mountains of eastern Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf, owed their success to their ability to control the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That they succeeded in this is clear, although evidence of ornamental water gardens from this period is limited to a few artifacts—a carved water basin from 3000 bc and a stone fountain from about 1,000 years later.

    illustration

    Ancient Egyptians drew water from the Nile with a simple device called a shadoof.

    The Assyrians, who inhabited the southern half of the Tigris and east, built vast hunting parks, and lifted water at least three stories high to plant the temple towers called ziggurats, the most famous of which were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

    The Egyptians were able to harness the Nile with a device called the shadoof, consisting of a horizontal pole attached to a pivot, with a bucket on one end and a counterweight on the other. (Employing elementary physics, it is still used today.) Carvings and relics in their tombs show us that they had elaborate pleasure gardens, where these desert dwellers could escape the heat among water birds and fish.

    In a tomb built in Thebes around 1400 bc, archeologists found plans for a garden entered by canal and divided into four main areas with a rectangular pond in each.

    This cross-shaped motif was often centered with plantings of lotus. Egyptians revered the lotus as both medicine and a religious symbol. Another early water garden plant was the bulrush, famous for hiding the abandoned infant Moses, but also used to fashion ropes, mats, sails, and even to construct rafts solid enough to transport stone obelisks.

    illustration

    In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Landscape Movement in Great Britain inspired a naturalistic style that emphasized water rather than heavy planting. Here, the reflection of the house in the water enhances the overall landscape.

    PERSIA

    ASIA

    ANCIENT GREECE, ROME, AND THE RENAISSANCE

    FRANCE

    ENGLAND

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