Pond of delights
A timely frog chorus prompts Toby to clean up his garden water feature and ponder over some long-forgotten gems
WHEN the resident choir of male frogs that live in my pond strike up their croaking song, it’s a reminder to give it a tidy before the water fills with easily disturbed, delicate new life.
If left to their own devices, the remnants of spent stems around the edge will clutter around new growth before slumping into the water and turning to sludge. The same goes for leaves that have blown into the drink during winter. I use a net to fish them out before piling with the prunings on the bank, so any pondlife they harbour has time to find its way back to the water.
It was while ‘fishing’ for leaves that something caught my eye – a long-lost trowel, missing in action since bulbplanting time. I’d obviously left it in what I thought was a safe place, only for it to do a ‘Tom Daley’ into the pond. Its stint in the depths might have aged the wooden handle but, once dry, it’s nothing a coat of olive oil won’t cure. Many treasures have been lost to a pond, and finding my trowel brought to mind another. Violins at the ready, as I am talking about my family’s fortune.
At the turn of the 20th century, my great-grandfather was a logistics magnet with a team of shire horses, transporting Italian stone to build the grand houses of the well-heeled. His last job was to furnish a mansion in Godalming, Surrey, owned by a scoundrel called Whitaker Wright. Wright was a financier with questionable integrity and a taste for the theatrical, who commissioned the creation of a ballroom under his lake – yes, you’ve read that right!
Just as the work was finished, but before he’d paid for the stone, Wright was arrested for fraud. In a dramatic courtroom twist, he took his own life by swallowing a cyanide capsule just as the judge passed down the ‘guilty’ verdict. The upshot was that the family horses were sold, and my great-grandmother and siblings went from relative gentility to farm work.
So, when tidying your pond, keep your eyes peeled. Whether it’s trowels or ballrooms, you never know what you might find!
“Many treasures have been lost to a pond”