Almost every garden has a pond. And he always gets the shot: the owners love their pond (or even the small pond), are proud of them and believe almost the main achievement of his garden. That’s clear. But the strict look of a professional often notes annoying mistakes in the creation of reservoirs, which are repeated in many gardens with offensive constancy.
We asked the landscape designer to analyze some typical mistakes of Amateurs and tell about what you need to know to make a decorative pond, stream or waterfall in the garden.
Building a pond? Make no mistake!
Perhaps it makes no sense to convince someone that the pond in the garden is good. Water as a magnet attracts the General attention and even in the photos always looks mysterious and alluring. Is it any wonder that today the pond has become an indispensable attribute of the “gentleman’s set” of any design project for the development of a new land plot or the reconstruction of the old one.
Unfortunately, as a result of a formal approach to business, one garden becomes similar to another. Professional designers stamp gardens as pies bake, they are actually cloned. To be honest, I am closer to the gardens of Amateurs, who, although sinning with some amateurism, still more attracted by their unsophisticated sincerity. All the actions of an Amateur come from the heart, and therefore the path is often winding, but in the end the truth is found, and not least thanks to intuition.
To make the path to beauty shorter, let’s try together to analyze the characteristic errors that are surprisingly repeated in many water bodies, and analyze their nature. And then gradually analyze all the subtleties and secrets of fast, easy and economical creation of the reservoir, which is ideal for your garden. So, the most typical mistakes.
Wrong size
This is the most common mistake: the pond does not match the garden and the surrounding plants in size. A small puddle, located somewhere near the fence or at the entrance to the garden and clamped on all sides lush and beautiful garden plants, no matter how you try, will always look miserable.
But this does not mean that a small pond (for example, in the form of a source) can not decorate the garden. Simply by choosing a particular image it is necessary to correlate it with the surrounding space.
A poorly chosen place
In no case do not have a pond on the background of unsightly buildings, carelessly decorated garden, piles of garbage, rickety fence but you never know what else.
Water always attracts the eye, so placing your pond in an unsightly place, you thereby focus attention on the shortcomings of the garden.
Mistakes in the selection of material
Buying materials for the garden, follow the law of similarity. If the house is made of brick or stone, their color, texture, shape and size must be repeated in the material of the fence, paving, decoration of other buildings. The same applies to a wooden house or a house sheathed with siding.
Often you can see the picture when some parts of the garden are very good: beautiful plants are logically grouped, carefully and with imagination decorated pond-and the overall impression of the garden is negative. You begin to analyze, and it turns out: the brutal appearance of the house is made of red brick with white plastic window frames, a powerful fence is assembled from ready-made concrete blocks, painted with bright pink paint with white festoons on top, carved gazebo is gilded with chiseled beams, it is asphalt tape track, over which the rocker of openwork white arches for roses, completes the picture of the presence here and there of colored plastic, assorted borders, vases and. As they say, comments are superfluous.
Conclusion: being engaged in the arrangement of the garden, bringing in all the new elements, try to anticipate the end result, to predict how the garden will look like in General. The pond should always correspond to the garden, buildings and surrounding plants in size and style and be located in the most advantageous place depending on the image you choose.
Defeat in the fight against plastic form
A common misconception: ready plastic form-the best choice if you decide to create a pond, as they say, small means. Yes, indeed, manufacturers offer a large range of such” baths”, and it seems that you can choose the form for every taste. But it’s not that simple. Even the biggest of them (and they are very expensive) will not be big enough in the garden, and small and just look like a misunderstanding. At the same time, all of them are clearly small in size are too intricate shape, which in place will never be natural.
The edges of such forms have a rounded profile, on which it is impossible to fix neither the soil for coastal plants, nor the stone, nor the more gravel. Some more expensive forms have a wide band glued on the upper edge of the quartz dusting, but most often it is so strikingly different from our local materials that decorate it still does not work.
Plastic molds are stamping method, and the cheap products often found annoying defect is the misalignment of the edges at the periphery, through which, no matter how you tried to carefully and exactly to dig this form you will not succeed in principle. Needless to say that sticking out over the water a piece of black plastic will nullify all your efforts. For clarity, this body of water can be compared to a luxury suit, which has the most prominent place bristling sloppy sewn lining. The appearance of such a suit is, at least, regrettable.
It is useful to add that to transport the finished form, especially large, is not easy and expensive, and as a result significantly increases the final cost of construction. I once had a chance to work with a plastic form of small size and at the same time intricate design. She was hopelessly skewed. I spent a lot of time, effort and nerves to somehow neutralize this congenital defect, but, unfortunately, there are things that can not be corrected.
However, rigid forms have a future. In Europe, for several years produced plastic forms of regular geometric shapes: round, rectangular, trapezoidal. They have a wide, flat, horizontally located edge, making them convenient to mount under all kinds of floorings. It is advisable to use them for raised formal reservoirs, which are effectively decorated with stone, wood, plastic, metal; they can be located at different levels and combined with fountains and waterfalls.
Conclusion: before choosing a particular method of waterproofing, you need to fully familiarize yourself with the positive and negative sides of each and conduct a comparative analysis. The lack of information about the quality of waterproofing materials in the presence of a large supply on the market leads to the wrong decision.