The sight and sound of water in the garden has a special allure in midsummer when the weather becomes hot and muggy. “Being able to have a soothing waterfall and living creatures and beautiful plants is like creating your own back-yard paradise,” says Linda Ray of Riverside. “It’s a great place to relax and watch nature.”
A pond has graced David Curry’s small back yard in Chicago’s Sheffield neighborhood for nearly 17 years. “What’s a garden but a celebration of the Creation and the season? It’s all taken to a note higher when you have a pond with living koi in it and the sound of falling water,” Curry says.
Back-yard ponds have been popular for years and, despite a shaky economy, interest continues to grow. “The market has just a little better than doubled in the past five years,” Bruce Butterfield, research director for the National Garden Association, says. Interest in ponds and other water features generated $1.2 billion in sales in 2001.
Butterfield attributes the growing interest to “avid gardeners who are looking to add an element of surprise, something new.”
“It’s definitely a national trend. Ponds are being built all over North America regardless of the climate,” says Tamara Hughes of Aquascape Designs and Pond Guy Publications in Batavia.
The ponds of Hughes and Ray are among 150 that will be showcased when the Midwest Pond & Koi Society hosts its 13th annual “Pond Tour” July 12 and 13, and Aquascape Designs holds its 11th annual “Parade of Ponds” July 19 and 20 (see accompanying story for more details).
Reflecting the popularity of water features, the tours drew about 3,200 visitors last year.
John Rottersman is a member of the Midwest Pond & Koi Society, a hobbyist organization whose members share a common interest in koi, goldfish, water gardening and ponds.
The society offers exhibitions, workshops, seminars, tours and interaction with similar groups and clubs.
Rottersman’s Naperville garden — which won an award from Chicagoland Gardening magazine for best pond in 1999 — is among the society’s 47 locations on display across the Chicago metropolitan area, stretching from Killdeer to Aurora to Tinley Park.
Bitten by the pond bug, Rottersman expanded his hobby and now offers pond classes. He suggests that tour-takers ask questions like: “What features do you like best on your pond and what would you have done differently.”
His garden includes a small lotus pond in the front yard and, around back, a 4,000-gallon pond with four waterfalls and 30 koi fish. The Batavia-based firm Aquascape Designs, which manufactures ready-to-assemble pond kits and filtration systems and publishes a magazine, “Aquascape Lifestyles,” installed the pond. Rottersman did the landscaping.
Billed as the biggest pond tour in the country, Aquascape Designs’ event offers more than 100 sites from downtown Chicago to Freeport, Ill. The tour includes a variety of small ponds — ideal for homeowners with limited garden space — to large ponds with numerous waterfalls, streams, bridges or gazebos.
The surrounding landscape is key to a good-looking pond, says Greg Speichert of Crystal Palace Perennials in Cedar Lake, Ind., and publisher of “Water Gardening” magazine. “It can be anything you want but it needs to match the rest of your yard. I’ll see a whole yard of hostas and they ring the pond with grasses and it doesn’t match,” Speichert says.
Speichert transformed the planting around a display pond last year from prairie style to tropical by replacing grasses and wildflowers with ginger, gaillardia, bananas and other tropical-looking annuals.
Butterflies, dragonflies and birds abound in Mark Pelegrino’s flower-filled landscape. Pelegrino’s garden, which will be open on both tours, features three ponds, two streams, seating areas and a bridge.
“A pond should feel like it belongs in the landscape instead of looking like an afterthought,” says Pelegrino of Magnum Landscaping in Worth, Ill. “It should complement the style that is already there.”
Although he prefers designing and building ponds with informal, naturalistic plantings that include coneflowers, sedum, ornamental grasses, Japanese maples, hostas and evergreens, Pelegrino says there is a place for formal ponds, especially for homes that have symmetrical or traditional style architecture. “Some people like formal-looking ponds with straight lines. The main thing is that it should feel like it belongs there.”
A do-it-yourselfer could install a small pond, which includes the liner, pump and filter, for less than $1,000.
Pelegrino estimates that a professionally installed 11-by-16-foot pond with a waterfall and a small stream would cost about $5,400. Smaller water features can cost $2,000 to $4,000 depending on the size, filtration equipment and features such as lighting, an important element that pond owners often overlook, says Pelegrino.
If you’re considering a pond, don’t err on the small side. “Build it as big as your yard and budget allow,” Ray says.
Curry’s pond was enlarged three times and is now 4-by-8 feet and 4 feet deep. A bigger water feature, however, means more commitment. “They can be a lot of work,” Curry says. Besides feeding the fish and caring for plants around the pond, he spends two or three hours every few weeks cleaning the pumps and removing leaves and other plant debris. He routinely checks the heater in winter to keep the water and his fish from freezing.
Most pond owners agree that the commitment is time well spent.
“I like the gentle sound of the water and the tranquility and peacefulness that [my pond] brings to me,” Pelegrino says. “The nice thing about a pond is that you can sit down next to it with a cup of coffee in the morning and start the day off right. And, it’s a nice place to come back to in the evening, to relax and feed the fish.”
Walk on the wet side
You can learn more about ponds by taking advantage of two area tours in July. Bring a camera and grab a notepad to capture ideas for your own yard.
– July 12 and 13: The 13th Annual Pond Tour, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost: $15 (good for both days) and can be purchased at 22 locations. The tour includes 47 locations across the Chicago metropolitan area, stretching from Killdeer to Aurora to Tinley Park. For more information, call the Midwest Pond & Koi Society at 312-409-2003, or see www.mpks.org.
– July 19 and 20: The 11th annual Parade of Ponds, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. July 19 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. July 20. Tourgoers have their choice of more than 100 sites from downtown Chicago to Freeport, Ill. Cost: $15 (good for both days). Call 630-326-2400 or see www.aquascapedesigns.com. Aquascape, the Batavia pond design firm that is the tour’s organizer, also sponsors a photo contest that last year brought in 755 entries with more than 900 pond images. You can see prize-winning photos on the company’s Web site. The deadline for entries is Aug. 31; for details, see the company’s Web site.
Learn more
– University of Illinois Extension offers tips on plants for ponds at: www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/watergarden/
– Water Gardening: The Magazine for Pondkeepers, P.O. Box 607, St John, IN 46373, or see www.watergardening.com.
— Nina Koziol
