Water gardens are thought of as notoriously difficult to accomplish, hard to maintain and taking a lot of space to build. The reality is that they can be done on a smaller scale nearly as easily as a larger one. A water garden can take up a small spot in your yard, just a corner of it it if you like, even if its a small yard.

The smallest water featured garden I’ve personally built housed a full fledged pond, and was its own little ecosystem. It was complete with visiting frogs and toads, butterflies and dragonflies, even though the pond was only about 30 inches in diameter. It did not take up a lot of space, wasn’t vastly difficult to accomplish an in time, over the course of about two years, the hardest I worked on it was to remove some overgrowth of the water lilies we’d planted. (which did teach me to sink them in pots as opposed to permitting them to run rampant in the water garden)

My first water garden was accomplished by means of a small submersible pump, a lovely blue colored tote, a plastic container with a lid, that will hold about forty gallons of water for the larger sized ones, or a bit smaller, about twenty or twenty five gallon sized, such as the ones you purchase at Walmart, some rocks to line the top of it and to build the steps down to it, and a few small goldfish, as well as some water lilies purchased from Earl May Garden Center.

It worked well for what it was, grew the plants admirably although there weren’t many of them, and the fish lived through summer of 100+ degrees and a subzero winter, so apparently it was good enough. It wasn’t perfect but it was lovely and we all like the sound of moving water right? Frankly if that’s the space you have available to you, its going to suffice and you can use your imagination and make that small buried tote the perfect mini water garden.

A year later I decided that I wanted something a bit more fleshed out, with some extra plants, a few lovely fish and a bit more room to grow the things I liked and so we upgraded, got the shovels out and began to dig.

The hole ended up about 3 feet deep, and probably six feet by six feet, took some real time to excavate and more to line and ready for the plants.

I highly recommend the small pond liners that can be found at nearly any gardening store (Plants and Things, Earl May Garden Center) as well as at department stores such as Shopko and Walmart Garden Centers. To this you add the pump, the mud or gravel that you line with, (I found that the small amount of dirt that gathers in the pond is a necessary evil for a real ecosystem to develop, where the frogs, fish and plants coexist in real harmony and create their own little world. The plants seem to grown better when the dirt sifts into the bottom, the frogs leave eggs and the dragonflies appear more often, strangely enough. As it rained and my pond overfilled, some dirt from the surrounding area sifted in, and made a small muddy area on the bottom of it, that was perhaps an inch deep. This has in fact greatly enhanced the pond, and I tend to leave it there.

If there aren’t a lot of rocks in your area, try contacting one of the construction companies, or perhaps the power or gas company who are always raking them out when they dig and always too, want to get rid of them.