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 How is it built?
You could build a swimming pond yourself, and the commercial process explains how, but in standard gardens the style will need much adapting.
Step one:
The site is visited by the designer and construction manager to choose a suitable area and check the geology of the site. The ponds are up to 8ft/2.5 metres deep and digging the hole correctly is the most important and expensive part.
Locating the pond in the lowest part of the garden gives it a very natural feel, whereas next to the patio makes it look like you built your house next to a lake.
In some cases between 150 and 400 square metres of space has been required, due to the large marginal areas needed for effective natural cleaning by the plants (bigger than most back gardens).
Smaller ponds are possible but the natural cleaning by the plants needs to be supplemented by mechanical filtration.
Step two: In comes the labour and the mechanical diggers. Some 200 tonnes of soil was removed for the first pond and had to be taken away (and at Hampton Court it also had to be brought back at the end of the show).
Step three:
The sides of the swimming area are reinforced with concrete before a specially made liner is laid over a Geotextile underlay. Now it finally stops looking like a building site and resembles a pond.
Waterfalls, decking and hard landscaping can be added. This is when the individual tastes of the customer start to show.
Step four:
The planting is vital to the success of the pond's stability and the plants need to be selected by the experts.
Lilies are placed nearer to the swimming area (plant-free zone) along with the oxygenators, the marginals are chosen to give all year round colour and structure, or to be good at cleaning up wastes.
It's important to keep distinct swimming and planted areas. The planted shelf (regeneration zone) is like a normal pond with shallow water for moisture lovers and shallow water marginals, like Gunneras, Geums, Sisirynchiums.
Deep water marginals, like Pontederias or Orontiums, are placed on lower parts of the shelf and the lilies of every colour are placed nearer to the open water.
It is amazing to swim up to the underwater lip which separates the plant and swimming zones, and be face-to-face with a fragrant lily bloom and a huge dragonfly hovering over it. |
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