Water wonderland
The well-dressed back yard or garden doesn’t just wear a carpet of lush, green grass and rows of colorful blooms these days. A fashionable garden now needs the cool blue and deep green of a pond and the soothing sound of water spilling over stone.
Sunday is the annual Inland Empire Water Garden and Koi Society pond tour. Seven pond owners will open their gardens and back yards and welcome visitors for a tour of ponds both large and small.
South Hill homeowner David Boshart built his pond in the back yard of his 1916 cottage five years ago. It was part of the plan he and his wife, Jana, developed after purchasing the house in 1995.
“I gave my wife graph paper and told her to lay it all out the way she wanted it,” Boshart said. “When she asked me later why the pond was so big, I told her I just built it the way she drew it.”
Using books checked out from the library as a reference, he dug the hole for the pond and covered the interior with a flexible heavy-duty liner.
He added a ring of handpicked flat rock around the perimeter. Using some of the dirt from the pond excavation, and scavenged basalt rock, Boshart built a waterfall to spill into the pond.
“I didn’t know I needed a liner for the waterfall,” Boshart said. “So the water didn’t fall. Instead it seeped down into the dirt.”
After adding a liner, and tweaking the arrangement of the rocks, he was rewarded with the constant splash of water.
Boshart landscaped the area around his pond with a mix of perennial and annual plants. Variegated hostas peek out of the dense groundcover growing over the rocks that form the waterfall. A Japanese maple drapes over the top. A formal rose garden is nearby. A hedgerow of arborvitae that towers over the house frames the back yard.
Potted miniature cattails, yellow flag iris and water lilies grow in the pond next to floating water lettuce and water hyacinths. A patio made of flat stones, with tufts of wooly thyme growing between the stones, surrounds the pond.
Boshart stocked the 2,000-gallon pond with “pet store” goldfish and adds several more each year. “I’m not sure how many there are,” Boshart said. “Every year I add a few, and then lose a few in the winter, and the survivors spawn.”
Boshart is a self-taught pond gardener. “The first Inland Empire Water Garden and Koi Society meeting I attended was on pond health,” he said. “I came away wondering how anything had survived because I was apparently doing everything the wrong way.” But the pond is thriving.
Now Boshart estimates he spends a couple of hours per week on routine maintenance. “There are the regular things to do, like skimming and propping up plants that blow over,” he said. “But most of the time I spend out here now is spent enjoying it.”
So far the only downside Boshart has found to owning and maintaining a small backyard pond is the occasional visit by raccoons. “I’ve heard that raccoons can hear running, or splashing water from blocks away,” He said. “And they can be a nuisance.”
The presence of the family dog takes care of the raccoon problem.
“So far, when there’s been a problem I’ve figured out how to fix it,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever done, I learned from a book.”