If You Plant They Will Come
Last September I put together a planting scheme for a large, lined pond at a beautiful home in the Cotswolds. It was to be a wildlife / swimming pond and, on a bright morning a couple of weeks later, the team from Merebrook Water Plants arrived to do the planting.
We started with the water lilies, planting them into 20lt planting baskets and pushing them out into deeper, but not too deep water. Freshly introduced water lilies should have no more than 20cms water measured from soil surface to water surface.
By 10am the lilies were all in place and we stopped for a break. It was then that we spotted the dragonfly, a lovely, blue bodied hawker, patrolling the pond.
Next we emptied two big bags of the oxygenating plant Ceratophyllym demersum around the pond, throwing it out into the water and as it slowly sank beneath the surface we noticed that a second dragonfly had joined the first.
We planted up some of the marginal plants, Pontedaria cordata, Iris Louisiana and Lythrum salicara, into 10lt planting baskets and lowered them carefully onto the shelves. By the time we finished it was lunchtime, so we stopped for a bite and a lovely cup of tea provided by the owner.
As we looked out over our planting, we could see that along with the now three dragonflies, a grey wagtail was visiting from the farm next door, and a pair of late swallows were swooping over the pond, hoovering up small flies that were dancing over the water.
We spent the afternoon adding more marginal plants, Myosotis palustris, Mentha aquatica and Veronica beccabunga, to the shelves. We finished the job just after 5pm and as we packed up our bits and pieces of tools, the day was just tilting from a warm, sunny afternoon to a lovely early Autumn evening.
On the pond, the female dragonfly was laying her eggs, the wagtail had gone home, but a few sparrows were now hopping about at the water’s edge and just as we bid goodbye to the job, we saw a couple of bats flitting around in the dusk.
That’s the thing about a wildlife pond, if you plant, they will come.
