Even more pond design pics

Want to hear lots and lots of water.  After packing this pond chockablock with plants, pumps, tubes and waterfalls, the client wanted to hear even more waterfall sounds.  So I attached a hose to a pump and pointed the hose up.  The higher the hose was, the more water came shooting out.  You can do this with a small pump and hose if you just want a bubbling sound at the top of the water.   It's easy.

This was not just a pond building job, but an entire garden landscaping job.  In fact, it won a city wide design competition. The owners were thrilled. We all were on television....in our pond building clothes. But we had champagne.  At 8 am.  

We had mostly sun to work in. The owners wanted no grass at all. They certainly were my kind of clients.  

After removing the grass, we dug the pond hole and build the pond first.  Then we installed that lattice you can see to help hide the yard from the neighbors. 

These folks lived on a busy street near a very busy city intersection.  The picket fence was already there, so we used it as part of the design.  The path leading to the picket fence was flanked with spots of specimen plants and underplanting just where the windows were in the house.  

We used the same rocks to make the path as we used to make the pond.  Arkansas moss rocks in case you are shopping for some.  

Visit my website at pondlady.com.  Visit us with your pond questions or just to show off your pond.

To learn more about pond design read my book.
A Practical Guide to Building and Maintaining your Pond, available here http://ow.ly/btFJQ

Pond photos

Maybe you can get some design ideas from ponds I have built.  Most of these are free form ponds with flexible liners.  Occasionally a formal pond done with concrete pops up, but not often.  My first love was making a pond look like it was there before a house was there and the house intruded.

This one was in a front yard.  See what happens here in the tropics when the plants just keep growing without being tended. Cutting back rather than encouraging to grow is how we tend our gardens.

Another example of our plant palette here in zone 9.  Isn't it wonderful?  I took this photo five minutes after we finished the  work. The rest of the crew is still cleaning up.

Visit my website at pondlady.com.  Visit us with your pond questions or just to show off what you have done.

To see more photos and get more ideas, read my book.
A Practical Guide to Building and Maintaining your Pond, available here http://ow.ly/btFJQ
Learn to build your own pond.

The Photos continue

This pond is in filtered sun and under lots of pine trees.  The empty spot screamed for a pond, so I built an above ground one with cinderblocks and a liner.  Because of the shade, I was able to plant taro in the water.  Gotta be careful of taro tho. It's invasive.

I got this pond on Bainbridge Island in Washington State up and running again to the delight of this guy who greeted me in the morning and defiantly claimed it as his.

I wrote a book about ponds.  You can buy it here.

And don't forget http://www.pondlady.com if you want to show off your pond or get your pond questions answered.

Ponds I have built

I am gonna post some photos of ponds I have built through the years. They might give you an idea of how to design your pond.

Pics keep me from having to think of a real post......

This is pond on concrete and the second floor of a condo complex. Because of its size and that it was in full sun, I used a UV light and commercial filter at a cost of nearly $4000.00. There are 12 tons of Arkansas moss rocks there....and we hauled them up to the second floor by hand. Whew.

This pond was a joy to build. Or I should say rebuild. Someone did it wrong, so I had to fix it.  The clients loved plants, so we did the best we could to add plenty of them.

Oh and buy my book:
Click here

Pond Design Ideas

No, this is not a profound design post.  Books, in fact, volumes of books have been written about design.  From gardens to houses to cities, we can find books about design.  This is a post of photos of ponds I have built, so you can see my ideas about design. Mostly, it's about what people want and what fits in their gardens and their lifestyles.

Two separate ponds make to look like one after the client decided his original pond needed to be bigger. Done without having to redo the entire first pond.

This is on the second floor courtyard of a huge condo-plex. 13 tons of rocks hauled to the second floor. By hand. One shopping cart at a time.

Client wanted to see pond from out the window. So the pond was built up instead of dug down. Those light spots are misters I installed to give it a mysterious and romantic look.

This waterfall is powered by an artesian well flowing into a 7 acre bayou.  I had to climb up the bottom of the waterfall to build the top.  That's like packing your own parachute.

This is a rather formal pond in the courtyard of Broussard's Restaurant in the French Quarter. Great place to eat, by the way.

This pond is 22 feet long with two waterfalls. The client wanted to hear water and even installed a baby monitor outside so he could hear it in the bedroom.

This pond was built at City Park in New Orleans for the Spring Garden Show back in 1990.  It won a design award.  See how to use hard materials in the design. Without the pot, the design fails.

Want to learn more about design:

Don't forget to buy my book here

It is consistently in the top ten best sellers in Landscaping.  Yippee.

It's on sale now for a buck.  Get it before the price goes back up.

And for pond info visit us at pondlady.com  You will find knowledgeable folks there who are glad to answer your questions.

Thanks for visiting today.  Have a great holiday weekend.

Making the pond appear bigger

If for some reason you cannot make your pond as large as you would like, there are design tricks you can use to fool the eye into seeing water where there is none. Try a dry stream bed or dry lake using rocks. Occasionally I have placed round river rocks carefully in a pattern and epoxied them in. I then spray them with a clear lacquer occasionally to keep them looking wet. In the picture, the client wanted a moving water look to go with her more natural looking pond and landscape. You can use whatever you wish. Design is not some secret science that only pros use. It is what looks good to you. Have fun with it.