Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home: Designing, Constructing, Planting (Creative Homeowner) Step-by-Step Sequences & Over 400 Photos to Landscape Your Garden with Water, Plants, & Fish

by Kathleen Fisher

Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home  provides essential information on designing and installing all types of home water gardens, from naturalistic to formal, plus fountains, waterfalls, streams, and bog gardens. Readers will learn how to construct each of these structures, as well as how to design bridges and stepping-stones.

Genres: Gardening

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2011

Reviews

[Scott Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my yard, I have the perfect area for a waterfall feature. It's on a 5-foot downhill slope in a sunny area. It's hard to get anything but weeds to grow there instead of fescue grass because of perpetual, late-summer sun. We have many gardens, but I'm concerned that the heat would do many plants in. So I want to install a waterfall feature to bring sounds alongside flair, but I'm unsure how to do so. I work as a data guy, not a landscaper or a builder, so I needed a guide to show me what to do. This book fit that bill.

It focuses mainly on ponds with waterfall features as an addendum. Nevertheless, some degree of ponding water is necessary for waterfalls, so enough overlap existed for my needs. It also discusses wildlife, like fish, at length. I wasn't interested in that feature to my waterfall, but some - even most - might share that interest. Extensive discussion about plants fill certain sections, but my wife, possessing a deeper passion for gardening, will likely consult those sections after I install the waterfall.

My favorite feature of this book is the beautiful pictures from a variety of installations. Besides being a how-to manual filled with technical and scientific knowledge, it excites the imagination with raw elegance from a variety of cultures. It demonstrates final products of beauty and then dissects how to engineer a project to get to that endpoint. Pulling off a good water feature in a yard requires meticulous preparation, and I'm glad I consulted this book to think through my plans ahead of time.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent source for all parts of water features for a landscape. There are step by step directions, photos, suggestions and definitions of words.

[Granville Westecott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nit really what I need to build something for home

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensive information on building/maintaining a backyard pond along with fish types, plant types, predators, etc.

[Arthaey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The section on moving water is very small and assumes you always connect it to a regular still-water pond. Not the right book about stream features.