Making a small wildlife pond in your garden

Create an aquatic habitat for wildlife: even a small pond in an urban garden will make such a difference to your outdoor space and the creatures that visit it.

In early June this year, my husband and I started digging a wildlife pond in our garden. We’d been talking about doing this for years, but somehow always found more pressing jobs to do.

Digging out the pond and levelling the edge
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Thankfully, after all the early, wet summer weather, our spades easily cut through the heavy clay soil. This saturated soil was heavy to lift, however, and we took turns lugging it in the barrow to a hidden corner of the garden.

Stage 1 – digging finished.
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After a couple of shifts digging together – we know how to have fun! – we’d dug out a circular pond at 2.6 m wide with a couple of marginal shelves and the deepest point at 90cm. 

Next, we removed any sharp stones and smoothed the ground with sand, shaving off areas to get the edge as level as possible. Then we put down a protective fleece liner and, finally, an EPDM rubber liner.

The protective fleece went down first
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What water should you use to fill a pond?

It was time to start filling the pond. We hooked up a hosepipe to our water butts and drained them in. For ponds, rain water is better than tap as you get less of an algal bloom.

Filling the pond with rain water collected in our water butts.
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At this point, even our teenage son got involved – excited to see the pond filling up with water. We decided to add some sand to the pond in order to give a bit of cover to the liner and to something for the plants to root into. 

Sand caused cloudy pond water, temporarily!
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I thought we’d made a terrible mistake: the pond immediately turned very cloudy and had an unpleasant flotsam that looked like vomit. Oh dear.

Thankfully, we found that – after adding the oxygenators and some native pond plants – the water cleared. But it did take around three weeks for the sand to settle. I’m now glad we added the sand as it lightens the pond and makes it easier to observe species within it.

Colin, a local landscaper came to help and did a great job of laying the edging stones and pointing in between.  Then it was just a case of trimming the edges of the pond liner and adding gravel to cover it. 

It was interesting how much bigger the area looked once the stone edging was in: it takes your eye further.

Plants for wildlife ponds

A friend down the road kindly gave us some oxygenators and native pond plants from her beautiful pond.  The oxygenators are: Hornwort Ceratophyllum demersum, Spiked Milfoil Myrophyllum spicatum,  Watercress Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum and Water Crowfoot Ranunculus aquatilis.

We also did a trip to Wildwoods Water Garden Centre in Enfield and came back with lots of native pond plants: Watercress Nasturtium aquaticum, Hard rush Juncus inflexus, Cotton grass Eriophorum angustifolium, White water forget-me-not Myosotis scorpioides ‘Snowflakes’, Sweet galingale Cyperus longus, Arrowhead Sagittaria sagittifolia, Sea rush Juncus maritimus, Water plantain Alisma plantago aquaticum, and the only British native water lify: Nymphaea Alba. 

As well as lots of oxygenators, we added Frogbit Hydrocharis morsus-ranae. This looks like a tiny waterlily and we have noticed the pond skaters flock to it.

We also intoduced some Ramshorn snails Planorbis corneus, these feed on algae and dead plants therefore helping to keep the water clear. 

We’d put the plants and snails in just before we went on holiday for a couple of weeks, when the water was pretty soupy. So we were amazed that it had cleared by the time we returned.

What are oxygenator plants?

These are plants that are partly or totally submerged in the pond – they absorb carbon dioxide during the daylight hours and exchange it for oxygen.

Oxygenating plants also absorb nutrients that algae (such as blanket-weed) would otherwise use. In addition, they provide excellent habitat for wildlife and provide shade within the pond.

Spot the great crested newt!
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Wildlife in our pond

I was really surprised at just how quickly life appeared in the pond.  Within forty-eight hours of filling the pond with water, creatures started to arrive – the first being a diving water beetle. 

On day three we saw our first pond skater and soon after that a lot of mosquito larvae appeared, along with a group of whirligig beetles.

After we returned from holiday, in the second two weeks of July, we were amazed to spot a great crested newt clinging to the stalks of the water lily – in the deepest part of the pond. The mosquito larvae had all gone (probably eaten by newts and dragonflies).  

We saw the crested newt intermittently, mainly in the evenings, until the end of August. He’s disappeared now, hopefully to return in spring.  Crested newts actually spend much of the year on land, hibernating from October to February, returning to water in spring to breed.

Our first dragonfly to arrive was the green and turquoise Southern Hawker.  They have a curious streak and landed on us a few times as if checking us out.  Since late August, we’ve seen lots of Common Darter dragonflies.

One sunny day, we saw various couples flying in tandem. The male was at the front, helping the female resist the water tension as she dipped the tip of her abdomen in the pond (whilst in flight) to lay her eggs on foliage at the pond edge. 

The lifespan of an adult dragonfly is short – typically only a week or so.  They spend most of their lives as nymphs and live up to five years in the water (depending on the species), shedding their skin 5-14 times before they are fully grown and ready to leave the water.

We also spotted a large frog a couple of weeks ago, quickly disappearing into the weed. The garden birds come to drink from the pond (as well as bees, wasps and other pollinators) using the waterlilies as landing pads.

We love sitting by the pond, watching its life unfold. It leaves me marvelling at the speed at which this aquatic habitat has settled and becomes enriched with so many different species.