Another Look at the Pond Garden

I wanted to show you a few more pictures of my pond garden. This is a garden I’ve really struggled to get right. Rob and I built the pond in 2010, and I’ve been working on the surrounding garden ever since.

The garden is contained inside a picket fence painted dark green to blend in with the foliage. In the early morning you’ll often see fresh dainty sandy footprints running up the pickets⁠—evidence that raccoons have been to the pond for a moonlight visit.

A stone path encircles the pond. The path is homemade (made by me) and has something of the scrap quilt about it since I used bits of stone left over from other paths to complete it. I cobbled it together from small, mismatched pieces in various colors⁠—silver, gray, brown, white, tan, and orange. Very recently I outlined the path with chunks of field stone, which gave it a fancy look that reminds me of dribble decorations on a sandcastle.

The plants in the pond garden are plentiful and include all my usual favorites: ferns, Indian pinks, golden ragwort, camellias, sasanquas, coonties, beautyberry, and needle palm. The garden is shaded by water oaks, a white oak, some pawpaws, and a big leucothoe.

I have quite a collection of garden ornaments—small statues, birdhouses, birdbaths, seashells, and other doodads. I think it’s fun to hide these neat things in nooks and crannies and corners, like treasures for you to find. Tucked under the fern fronds and among the tree roots are a concrete squirrel, two elves, a couple of gnomes, a lamb, two bunnies (one life-size and the other quite gigantic), a duck, and four owls. Real creatures mingle with the fake ones. I often see a mockingbird perched on the tall ears of the giant bunny statue.

The pond garden is a peaceful, quiet place—a refuge. When you open the gate, you’re entering into a separate, secret little world. Lush plants block the view of everything outside. You can’t see anything ugly⁠—not the nearby road or the passing cars or the power lines. The other day I was sitting in the pond garden, hidden by ferns, drinking a blackberry smoothie. The frogs were croaking, and the goldfish were glistening and glowing in the sun. A squirrel poked her head out of the tin-roofed birdhouse, then hopped out and ran up a nearby water oak tree. I’d been working from home and was on my lunch break, and it really was a break⁠—not just from work but from all the craziness of the human world.