Build a Water Garden

Several years ago we constructed a small pond and waterfall at the back entrance of our underground home.  When it was finished, we hated it and it leaked!  After a couple of years we decided to disassemble it, replace the liner and rebuilt it.  After a lot of work we finally finished and again we were very disappointed.  We cane to call it the “birthday cake” as it had a sort of layered look.  Thinking we could do better we decided to try one more time.  A cousin of mine has property with many large, beautiful rocks and offered to give us as many as we wanted (we exchanged some bamboo with him).  All the rocks at our place are small and we knew we wanted larger rocks with a less uniform look.  One of the lessons we had learned over the many trials and errors was to use a pond liner that was plenty big enough.  With the earlier ponds the liner did not extend out to the sides far enough and water leaked out beyond the edges.  We also wanted a bigger pump so the waterfall would be more dramatic, and so we began on the new pond.

Removing the Old Pond

The first step was to remove all the plants and most of the rocks that made up old pond.  We stored the plants (mostly ferns) nearby, as well as the rocks.  We then removed a lot of dirt to make room for the large rocks and waterfall.  The dirt is very sandy and holds it’s shape very  well so we tried to terrace it in order to have firm places to place the rocks.  The liner was about 12 x 12 feet and looked bigger than needed.  We spread it out and tucked it into the bottom and top ponds with plenty of slack between.   We made sure the liner came up over the edges of the ponds at least a foot or more just to be safe.  Once we had the liner in place we started placing rocks.  We had an idea of what we wanted but kind of played it by ear as we went along.

Pond Liner In Place

The small rocks at the bottom will be below the water in the pond.  These had to be placed very firmly with mortar to form a base for the much larger rocks that will form the waterfall.  Most weighed in excess of 100 pounds and there were quite a few.  At this point we were not sure how we would get them in place but we had moved larger rocks before so we knew a few techniques we could use.