A piece of paradise
The water feature at the centre of the Paradise Garden looks slick but was in fact cobbled together. Luckily I had the great Mark Gregory to advise me – he has built over 90 Chelsea show gardens, all featuring water, and won countless Gold Medals for them.
The basin is a metal fire bowl, bought on eBay, with a hole drilled in the bottom. A copper pipe fits through this, connected to a piece of hose that’s attached to a small pump. The water is fed from a nearby tap, via an underground pipe, with an everyday lavatory ballcock controlling the flow.
All this hidden stuff is housed in a concrete-block tank about 1m³. I dug a hole and lined it with the thickest butyl liner I could find, then covered that with a protective soft layer to stop it being punctured. We made a concrete pad, measuring about 10cm deep, over the base and built the walls on that. The whole thing is effectively wrapped in butyl, so if the concrete leaks, the water is still contained.
A metal grid covers the tank, on which the bowl sits, while around the edge are stone slabs with sufficient gaps for the overflowing water to run back down into the tank, to be pumped back up to the fountain. We dismantle, clean and check it all every six months to remove any gunk, and I only turn it off when the weather is very wet, because the tank fills up with rainwater.
Mark’s main advice was to keep everything as simple and low tech as possible – then you will be able to fix any of the inevitable problems yourself.
to thin or clear any of these plants, letting them sprawl, jostle and take over the pond. The water was still there, but the cover dominated.
This was clearly doing good – frogs in particular loved it – but this year I decided to move it. I drained it, carefully re-homing all visible life and putting almost all the water into our larger pond, and made this one bigger and more central in its plot. This has worked a treat. It still has the same virtues for wildlife – and it’s astonishing how quickly it has been reoccupied – but looks much better and is now an area we enjoy sitting in as the sun gently falls.
I have always loved rills – those long, slim stone- or brick-edged canals that are so sublime at 18th-century Rousham, 20th-century Hestercombe and many other gardens going back to the Italian Renaissance. I seriously considered making a rill down the middle of the Cricket Pitch, but they are tricky and expensive, and I demurred. After my Paradise Garden
TV series, however, I decided to make a ‘paradise’ garden with a central rill, as they feature strongly throughout the Islamic world. But the budget stymied that (as the Paradise Garden was made on a shoestring, costing about as much as the sandwich budget for the average Chelsea show garden) and in its place we have a very simple bubbling fountain. I love it – gently mesmerising, it immediately made the Paradise Garden a calm and reflective place.
This simple bubbling, spilling bowl does little to attract wildlife compared to the other two ponds – although Nellie always drinks from it and the birds bathe in it – but it does an awful lot for this gardener’s soul.
Water will always enrich a garden, for you and all the wildlife that you share it with. It need not be big or ambitious – just wet.