Stones make a neat edge but a poor habitat
Rock and stone make neat, convenient and artistic edges to ponds – but they’re not much good for wildlife and pretty much sterilise one of the most important parts of your pond.
That’s because the greatest variety of plants and animals usually lives at the pond edge (not out in the deeper water) and covering this in concrete or stone greatly reduces the potential of your pond.
So if you’re trying to encourage wildlife, go easy on the rocks – very few ponds in natural world have completely rocky edges (I’ll try to find a picture of the only examples I can think of immediately – inland rock pools in South Africa and Australia!). Not many animals really like this rocky environment.
But so popular are hard edges to ponds that it’s difficult to find a picture of a garden pond without rocks.
Even the leaflet on wildlife garden ponds produced by the government conservation agency Natural England, shows ponds with concrete or rocky edges. Oops.
If you do suffer from a rock fringed pond don’t despair. I’ll talk about how to make the best of things later, mainly by letting your pond fill up wth all kinds of plants, and making sure the water is as clean as possible.
Tags: Garden pond design
October 16, 2008 at 1:21 am |
How about gravel edges? at least for part of the pond. If I build a pond, I’m trying to think how to keep gulls from the nearby lake or raccoons from eating the fish or crayfish.
October 16, 2008 at 7:23 am |
Hi Monado
People often talk about having gravel edges – making a little beach – to let birds (and other bigger animals) get into the water to bathe / drink. I don’t know how vital these really are – after all, creatures big and small have been making their way down to the water’s edge to drink for millions of years, and probably most of these places don’t have a convenient patch of gravel for accessing the water (I s’pose except around bigger lakes – where waves wash the shoreline).
But interested to hear how other people rate these gravelly edges.
As for gulls, the gulls we have over here don’t really know how to eat fish – they sit on the surface and can’t really dive – so unless the fish is dead, or extremely stupid and practically offering itself up to be eaten, I should have thought they ought not to be a problem – but interested to hear your specific situation.
As for racoons – these are definitely something we don’t have experience with in the UK – looking on the web, I expect you’ve heard all the suggestions including putting up a strand of electric wire, covering the pond with mesh (we do that here if we’ve got valuable fish to protect from herons), stringing fine lines around the pond that they bump into, and repellents. I don’t know how well any of these work – I expect the more determined you are, the more likely they are to work.
But how important are the fish to you? Most small wildlife ponds (how big is yours) don’t need fish – even if you do have fish, maybe its not such a bad thing if the racoonds do take a few fish? Though if you’ve bought expensive fish obviously not such a good idea.