Monday, June 08, 2009
I’VE just built myself a new garden pond.
To be accurate, it’s two ponds. There’s a small one at the bottom of a rockery and a tiny one higher up. A little waterfall driven by a submersible pump connects the two. I suppose this means it should be classified as a water feature.
It’s quite attractive, now that I’ve planted up the rockery. I did this using some alpine flowers bought from the garden centre but also used quite a few wild plants.
I’ve always liked the plants that grow in the cracks in old limestone masonry, built using old-fashioned mortar rather than cement. So I made a couple of collecting trips and one of the first things I came back with was ivy-leaved toad-flax.
This is the plant that you see hanging in great tresses down old walls. Its leaves do look like miniature ivy leaves and its flowers are like tiny, pale violets. It was originally imported into Ireland as a garden plant ages ago. But it went wild and it seems to have gone out of fashion with gardeners. Then I went hunting in the same old walls for miniature ferns. I did quite well, coming back with two species of spleenwort, wall rue and rusty-backed fern. These are impressive in rockery, particularly the maidenhair spleenwort.
There’s no doubt about the attraction of water in a garden but it also provides other benefits. There’s no naturally occurring open water in the immediate vicinity of my house so in dry weather, when the puddles disappear, the local wildlife would have to travel quite a distance for a drink or a bath if it wasn’t for my ponds.
Years ago I kept bees and, like all beekeepers, I watched them all the time. I was surprised by how frequently they’d fly from the hive directly to the edge of a pond and drink. We don’t tend to think of insects needing a drink but they do. Most species of butterfly will come to a garden pond to drink.
But a word of warning here, based on past experience. Some garden ponds and water features, including some commercially available ones, can be wildlife death traps. They must have gently sloping sides to allow easy access otherwise birds, animals and insects can slip in, become water-logged and drown.
Last year a blackbird drowned in my garden while it was trying to drink from a rainwater butt. I’ve known a similar thing to happen to wood mice and, on one occasion, a hedgehog. It can even happen to insects. It’s almost impossible for a butterfly to take off from the surface of water.
And easy access is even more important if you have ambitions to attract frogs or newts to your pond. Newts only spend a few months in the summer in the water and frogs only a few weeks in the spring. The rest of the year they’re land animals. But they have to get in and out of the water at least twice a year and they’re not particularly agile. It’s a bit too soon for the local wildlife to have discovered my new ponds, though yesterday they were thoroughly inspected by a curious cock chaffinch.
The tiny upper pond is designed to be a bird bath. Blackbirds are particularly fond of splashy washing and I’m expecting the first one any day now. Bumble bees, attracted by the flowering heathers and saxifrages, have already taken a sip or two of water.
There is certainly a sense of satisfaction about having created something that’s pleasant for people and useful for a lot of other creatures.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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