The Garden Pond Blog

A picture from last night: looking down into the chamber of the German parliament, the Reichstag.

Somehow I can’t imagine the British parliament even considering using a German architect to transform the House of Commons (the Reichstag was re-designed by British architects Foster + Partners).

The building is truly inspirational – in every sense at the front line of modern history.

Oh, and why was I there? We were meeting to discuss the planning of the 4th international meeting of the European Pond Conservation Network, to be held in May in Berlin.

The EPCN exists to promote the conservation of ponds at a European level. Those of a more campaigning bent might like to look at the Pond Manifesto produced by the EPCN.

Steve comments:

‘…you have more information on this site than I have seen anywhere. Great !‘

Thank-you.

Ands asks:

‘Is it all from experience with your own ponds or gained from elsewhere ?’

It’s based on Pond Conservation’s research over the last 20 years, interpreting the work of other freshwater biologists (both those studying ponds and those investigating lakes and rivers), it’s based on our practical experience of making and managing ponds, and most recently it’s from starting to look carefully at garden ponds.

We’ve learnt a huge amount from the two ponds we’ve made in our garden and also from the Big Pond Dip that people started to help us with last year.

There’s masses more that, collectively, we can find out about ponds and their wildlife from garden ponds – I’ll keep you posted about new initiatives (and also the results of the Big Pond Thaw survey, and the 2009 Big Pond Dip results) as they come up.

Final question:

‘Have you any information on what plants would best be suited to this type of shallow wildlife pond.’

Will answer that later!

Is spawn laid on 25 February early? Well – it all depends where you are in the country.

This time last year I posted copies of a couple of maps which show roughly when spawning takes place.

You can see them here.

So if you’re in south-west England, south and west Wales or one the south coast – now’s when spawning begins.