Ponds – Adding Water to Your Garden
As small as a bucket or as large as a loch, every garden will benefit from the inclusion of a wildlife pond. All life is dependent on fresh water for survival and your garden and its wildlife is no exemption. Many plants and animals have adapted to life in water.
Planning a pond
Size is irrelevant to the overall value of a pond, but it is important to you. Make your pond the size that both suits you and is the appropriate size for your garden. Even small ponds can be a great addition to your garden! The same goes for the location of your pond, but one important thing to remember is wildlife ponds do not thrive in dark or poor light situations. Everything living needs sunlight, so keep that in mind when picking a location.
Creating Environmentally Friendly Gardens has a great wildlife pond section (page 11 to 17). The section gives you information on the materials to use, things to think about before starting and what native plants to use.
Honey Bees are often seen drinking on a warm day © Simon Ferrar
Other helpful resources
The Freshwater Habitats Trust created a great leaflet on creating your garden pond filled with simple instructions including: what plants to use/avoid, a calendar for maintenance, an FAQ section and an Invertebrate ID guide. If you are keen to learn more on this subject, we would also recommend their own book titled, The Pond Book which is available from their website as well.
A great page about managing dragonfly and damselfly habitat can be found on the British Dragonfly Society website. Although we don’t frequently consider it, our garden can serve as a haven for dragonflies. It is known that 17 different species of dragonflies frequently reproduce in garden ponds. Your garden will become a fascinating and magical place you never knew existed if you have a dragonfly pond!
Utilise what you’ve got!
A novel idea you may not have thought of, is to utilise your house’s drainpipe which collects rain water. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) has a fantastic webpage and video explaining the process of making a mini drainpipe wetland for wildlife! This has the added benefit of slowing down the run-off of rain water into our drainage systems, which is especially important in urban areas which are full of hard surfaces that do not absorb water. By slowing water flow, we can reduce the chances of drains filling up too quickly and overflowing.
WWT drainpipe wetland © The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust
Another option is to create a new (or encourage an existing!) boggy area of your garden. Again the WWT has a very informative webpage and video on how to create a standalone boggy area, or add this beside an existing pond, without affecting things such as building foundations.
The RSPB also provide advice on adding water to your garden from ponds to bird baths. Don’t discount the value of having something as simple as a small dish filled with clean water and pebbles – even our smallest creatures need access to drinking water. Just make sure to clean such a dish out regularly!
Small ponds are better than no ponds!
Even small ponds can be great for wildlife, this pond is 35x35cm and 60cm deep © Simon Ferrar
Frogs love this small pond and have been back every year © Simon Ferrar