There are an increasing number of cases where otters are taking goldfish and koi from garden ponds. Otter numbers are on the up, and they are on the look-out for food. They might already have taken some of your fish, when you blamed a heron.
What is the real level of risk to your pond and can you do anything about it? Continue reading
With Spring in the air, the new stocks of pond plants will soon be appearing in the shops. On some occasion we have all obtained an interesting plant seen at a supplier, or following a description in a catalogue, book or online article. We’ve tried growing it ourselves and then been disappointed when it fails to flourish. Why won’t it grow?
This article looks into some of the reasons why a plant might fail and suggests how to get plants to flourish in future. Continue reading
Ornamental ponds with brightly coloured carp and goldfish can be easy pickings for herons, especially in the cool of the spring and the winter when the fish are sluggish and plant cover is lacking.
I’m often asked how to stop herons taking fish. There are various options and this is my experience on how they stack up: Continue reading
We’ve added a Twitter account to keep followers updated on topical water gardening issues, and we’ll also use it to highlight any new items that we add here.
We promise not to overload you with tweets, so if you have a Twitter account and are interested in ponds, water gardens, ornamental fish and water features, please consider following us.
Nymphaea ‘Purple Fantasy’
(Pic: Tamara Kilbane)
Back in the late 1800s the only hardy waterlilies available were white or pink and very occasionally red. Then a Frenchman (Latour-Marliac) succeeded in hybridising waterlily species drawn from different parts of the world, and gave us yellows, more reds, and a cluster of copper-orange varieties. The garden world marvelled at the range, and Monet filled his ponds with the new varieties. Following Marliac’s death in 1911, the numbers of new varieties dropped to a trickle. No other hybridisers seemed to share quite the same knack of picking the right parent lilies to cross.
By the 1980s-90s new hybridisers had finally broken through this barrier, and a multitude of exciting new cultivars started to appear, including eyecatching new peach colours which are already popular with my customers… but no hardy blues.
It is only in the last five or so years that successful crosses between hardy lilies and tropical blue lilies have been made Continue reading
After the coldest March for fifty years, temperatures are finally rising. Gardens seem to have been in suspended animation for months, but are now awakening.
In the pond too, things have been slow to get going. In many cases frogs have only just started to spawn in the last week – a month later than usual (and a full eight weeks later than the mild spring of 2007).
Now is the time to check that your pumps and filters are functioning correctly Continue reading