a pond in a pot
If you don’t want to dig, here’s the answer.
ONGOING efforts to transform my clay soil are definitely paying off.
Now the top three or four inches are so dark and crumbly that sometimes I forget what actually lurks beneath, but last week, while digging a deep hole for a new plum tree, I found myself doing battle with the heavy stuff.
Digging out a space large enough for the roots was such hard work that at one point I abandoned both spade and fork and resorted to slicing out slabs with a large kitchen knife. It came up in thick, orange slices, like the sort of samples taken by climate scientists when sinking cores to determine what sort of pollen was around 2000 years ago.
At one point my seven-year-old came over to peer into the hole. “Wow, clay,” he said. “We can make pots.”
How plants cope with it defeats me, but a surprising range of flowers flourish despite having their roots in this gunge. My roses love it, shrugging off both blackspot and powdery mildew to produce the sort of glossy foliage and beautiful blooms that would be the envy of anyone who gardens on better soil.
Rather than trying to break down the clay across the whole garden, which would be a long and exhausting task, I decided several years ago to replace the soil in planting holes and to work on the rest of the garden from above. This has involved piling on compost and letting the worms do the hard work of mixing it in.
Since then the worm population has soared and the soil no longer dries out in summer or turns to mud in times of rain. Except, that is, at the depth needed to plant a fruit tree. Once I’d finally excavated a planting hole I
poured in a bucket of water to see what would happen. An hour later the water level had barely dropped.
Here, I realised, were the perfect conditions for making a pond. If you’ve got heavy clay you can create a water feature without having to fuss about with liners. Except that I don’t know where I’d put a pond – the lawn is gradually disappearing as I widen the borders to accommodate ever more plants so there’s no decent space left to put one.
This lack of water in the garden has been on my mind lately, so I’ve decided to create a pond in a pot. This is easy enough to do. You can either choose an impervious container or seal up any holes with silicon sealant, coating the insides of terracotta with a layer of varnish.
It doesn’t need to be large, even quite a small container with just a few plants would make a lovely feature, but if you want to grow Pygmy water lilies then it does have to be deep, as these like to have a good depth of water above their roots.
I do want water lilies but can’t decide between white and deep pink varieties. The answer, of course, is to create several pond containers as that way I could have both.