v-g Backpacking in Britain Blog

An off-topic post to cover a long layoff from the hills, with only a very tenuous connection to walking and backpacking: I know some of us have an interest in our flora and fauna conservation as well as the landscape itself.

We had been waiting for a few days of fine weather to tackle the daunting task of clearing out our garden pond, which has run riot for years, and last week was our chance. It’s not a fancy fish job with pumps and filters, but a simple wildlife setup designed to accomodate our many frogs, newts and countless other denizens of the deep, as well as attracting dragonflies and other insects with the aquatic and marginal plants, and providing  essential water for the birds. A pond is the best thing you can do for small scale conservation and the pleasure it brings is well worth the effort.

The original water lily planted centrally in the deep part was described as ‘Medium’ size and suitable for our pond which is about 14′ x 9′. Why do we ever heed these catalogues?. Every year it made a bid for global domination, thowing out a huge number of stalks with leaves the size of dinner plates, most of which stick up out of the water in a dense clump for lack of space. The marsh marigolds and bogbean had gone mad too, choking the pond with stalks and large root systems so dense that the planting crates were lost in them. Dividing those old plants was just not practical: they were all beyond hope and had to go. The only survivors are the superb native Purple Loosestrife seen in the pictures, thriving in the connected bog garden section and happily isolated from the main aquatic excesses, and a self-seeded young marigold.

After a long job extricating all these old marginals, and rescuing the many and various small animals caught up in them, the dreaded moment came: it was time to wade in and haul out the lily, up to my waist in murky water with my face on the surface and reaching into the abyss to feel the magnitude of the rampant growth. The extended rhizomes were nearly as thick as my wrist, but amid the tangled vegetation I eventually located the rim of the big planting crate and heaved it upward. The buoyancy of the water helped at first but it was a struggle to get it onto dry land from that position, and it was huge once we could see it all. I climbed out and rescued the dragonfly and beetle larvae that had taken a fancy to crawling up my legs, and changed into dry clothes.

The next job was to try the new Pond Monsta, an electric impeller driven device with a long handle that works like a vacuum cleaner to draw out all the accumulated crud from the bottom of the pond. The sales blurb claimed that the device had a neutral buoyancy in water and was easy to use, but it was really hard work: it was very front-heavy and the trigger had to be squeezed constantly - there was no switch to lock it in the ‘On’ position - which made my arms and wrist ache like hell after only a minute or two. The waste pipe was also surprisingly heavy with all that water flowing through it and seemed to have a mind of its own, like wrestling an anaconda spewing watery dark sludge onto the flower borders. The Monsta has a separate collecting container with a filter mesh, but that clogged up completely in minutes and we abandoned it. We couldn’t see what the Monsta was doing down there, but judging by the ugly stuff coming out it seemed to work quite well. We stopped when the water level had dropped to just above the first shelf, preserving most of the old water and microscopic life and topping up with new.

Next day while all that was settling down a bit, we went to Stapeley Water Gardens for the new plants. This is where we bought all the original stuff for the first pond, and is one of those places that is more like a day out at a visitor attraction than a retail outlet - the signs from the M6 and the gigantic car park give you a clue. It’s also a place where we feel like buying everything in the gorgeous aquatic section, rather like some people in our circle apparently feel about gear shops… This time it was two lilies, one ‘Small’ and one ‘Small/Medium’, to be planted on the side shelves where we can easily take swift action if they get big ideas, and a selection of new marginal plants. Repotting all those in new crates occupied the rest of the day.

A morning of pressure-washing the stonework completed the project, by which time we felt really KO’d. The new pond looks sparse at the moment, and there will be algae and blanketweed for a while until the oxygenating plants like Hornwort thrive once more, but it makes a nice change to see so much open water. The frogs and newts seem to have forgiven us, or at least some of them have: there are faces peeping out by the new crates, several newts surfacing and diving occasionally and the water boatmen flit around their little territories as if nothing happened. We are looking forward to watching its development and evolution as the biosystem establishes itself again. What we do for our animals!.

Now for some good backpacking weather…