Envisioned Environment

No matter how firm a focus you maintain on making a pond into a safe, comfortable home for frogs, there’s always the need to keep at least one eye (if not both) on the way the pond looks. My goal, as I discuss in some detail in the video linked below, is to make every watershape I produce look as though it belongs where I’ve put it, as though the pond had been there for years and all my clients did was build or occupy a house that takes advantage of the view.

In fact, I’ve found as I’ve been at this longer and longer that I can’t really separate the aesthetics from the functionality: I really do keep both in mind at all times – so much so that I continuously access a mental image of how I ultimately want things to look from the time I start the excavation process.

And there are times when that’s a challenge: As the video shows, things occasionally get “ugly” during the installation process. For instance, looking at the kind of muddy mess that’s produced by rinsing down the rocks and gravel before filling the pond with clean water is just plain unpleasant, even though I know everything will be all right soon.

Not to get too philosophical, but it’s in these transitional stages of the process where I most need to have a sense of how everything in the project is working out – how the rocks and plants and decorative elements and water visually interact and how they are balancing. I also get caught up in the cosmic fact that I’m creating a delicate ecosystem and can easily envision how frogs or fish and plants will live in harmony in the artificial sanctuary I’ve made for them.

As mentioned above and as this video (click here) demonstrates, there’s a bunch of hard (and sometimes dirty) work to be done to prepare that sanctuary for use!

Eric Triplett is founder and chief executive officer at The Pond Digger Waterscape Design & Construction in Yucaipa, Calif. He may be reached at eric@the ponddigger.com.