We talk a lot about the importance of bringing biodiversity to our orchards, and one of the best additions we can make is a wildlife pond.
Even a small pond can bring a wide diversity of wildlife into the orchard, including the obvious – amphibians – such as toads, frogs, newts, but also birds and mammals such as mice, foxes and sometimes badgers! Invertebrates such as bees, dragonflies and other insects will also use the pond for drinking, breeding or overwintering.
Enhancing a pond with native shrubs such as dogwood and hazel, along with mounds of soil, rocks, deadwood, or slates can provide safe places for wildlife to shelter or overwinter close to the pond (called a hibernaculum). It’s a biodiverse utopia!
The Orchard Project recently created a new small wetland habitat at Cae Tan, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project on the Gower peninsula in Swansea. In this instructional blog, our project manager, Witchhazel, shares her pond design and installation tips that worked beautifully in the Wales project.
Step one: Location
Location is everything. The spot at Cae Tan had been chosen a few years earlier in a community design for the forest garden. The trees, shrubs, edible plants, medicinal herbs and nut trees have all been planted up in the forest garden, but there was an outstanding part of the project to create different habitats for wildlife. When designing the space, we drew the tree canopies at full size, so it was easy to work out what size of pond would fit as the forest garden grows and develops.
Step two: Planning and design
We had a few things we needed to think about for our pond plan and design:
- A solid plan of action: Our aim was to work systematically to avoid having to move piles of earth or stones more than once. This careful planning would speed up the project, save energy, prevent mistakes and ensure success!
- A variety of water depths: We wanted a shelf around the outer edge of the water, with a deeper central part for overwintering creatures (approximately 1m deep).
- Access for animals: A gentle slope out of the pond was needed to allow access and escape for wildlife.
- Diverse habitats: We aimed to create a pond with an additional bog garden section, which due to a natural slope in the land could be created below the pond.
- Natural planting: We wanted to create a natural planting scheme around the pond without planting directly into the pond.
- Pond liner: We dug a pit well in advance to monitor the water retention qualities of the soil. We were not surprised to find that due to the lack of clay, the soil was very free draining. It was therefore necessary to use a liner. We used a butyl rubber liner*, a resilient and versatile and flexible material with a high rubber content. This does not release toxic chemicals into the water. A fleece underlay protected the pond liner from sharp stones that may cause holes.
*Our preferred method would have been bentonite clay as it’s the most natural, but it is also the most expensive, very heavy and awkward to work with and can leak, particularly in hot weather when it can crack. It is more suitable for professional use than with inexperienced volunteers, as was the case here.
Step three: Making the pond in four sessions
Session 1: Ground Prepping
Firstly, we marked the outline of the pond using two bags of flour. Flour is a very useful and inexpensive marking-out tool, which can be ‘rubbed out’ and redrawn. It is particularly good for marking uneven surfaces. We sliced all the turf from the pond area and put it close by, ready to create a hibernaculum later.
The topsoil was then removed in trugs. It’s good to have a plan for the soil as there will be a large amount of earth to relocate. Most of the soil was transported to create a new bed in another area of the forest garden, while some of it was banked up on the lower side of the pond to ensure the pond edges would be level. We used a long spirit level to check this, but you can also use a shorter spirit level with a long wooden beam that spans the diameter.
Session 2: Digging
We dug down to create the shelf around the inside boundary and then a deeper central area. We were sliding around in mud like frogs! The next step was to work on the detail of the overall form and creating two hollows. A diversity of water levels meets the needs of different wildlife and some of the shallower areas will dry out in summer, forming ‘seasonal ponds’ which offer more diversity than a constant height of water. During digging, any stones we found were put to the side to be used as landscaping and in the hibernaculum.
Session three: Lining
Once we were happy with the form of the pond, we smoothed all the soil and removed as many stones and other sharp pieces as possible from the area. We covered the base with a good layer of building sand, followed by the fleece. We then laid out the liner as evenly as we could.
Once the liner was in place (but without cutting it back at this stage) we arranged cobbles and gravel on the sloping ‘beach’ area. The pond was then left to fill with rainwater – not a problem this past winter! The edges of the liner were not cut and shaped until we were sure the pond had completely filled and settled.
Session four: Planting
In our final session we planted the marginal plants in the soil around the edge of the pond. We included groundcover plants as we wanted to cover the liner, to both protect and hide it. It can get quite hot at the pond edges on the liner or the stoney areas, so the spreading groundcover plants will help to cover those areas and provide shelter, shade and escape routes for smaller wildlife. It’s ideal to have some shrubs near the pond to provide cover as well as adding some height and structure to the landscaping.
Witchhazel’s pond margins plant list:
- Bugle (Ajuga reptans)
- Marsh Marigold (Caltha palustris)
- Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia)
- Quaking grass (Briza media)
- Sneezewort (Achillea ptarmica)
- Greater bird’s foot Trefoil (Lotus pedunculatus)
- Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea)
We’ll be sharing Witchhazel’s tips about how to create a bog garden to complement your pond in a future blog – watch this space!
by Witchhazel Wildwood
Further reading:
Take a look at our guide on how to cultivate biodiversity in your orchard here, our guide on attracting beneficial predators into your orchard here, and our guide on the amazing, rare species that live in orchards here.