No matter how virtuous a gardener feels creating a waterwise landscape, there still lurks a yearning for a lush oasis.
Some years ago a friend transformed a hot, barren yard into a delightful retreat by building a stone grotto with a waterfall and reflecting pool surrounded by wildflowers.When I moved and, like my friend, was faced with a juniper-and-mulch yard, my thoughts turned to water. I decided to replace the evergreens and clay with a garden pool and a cascading fountain.
While my friend's grotto required enormous effort and time, my pool installation was a comparatively easy project. My friend used rock and concrete; I used a preformed rigid plastic pool. Lightweight and UV tolerant, the rigid liner can be handled and installed by a do-it-yourselfer in a weekend.
The 250-gallon, irregularly shaped pool, called a "lagoon," has a surface area of 40 square feet. The pool, a present to me, arrived at our home tied down to the roof rack on my four-wheel-drive vehicle. The pool was manufactured by MacCourt Pro-ducts, a Denver company and the largest maker of rigid pools in the country.
Following advice from local garden centers and from a leaflet picked up with the pool, we put the pool in an area with these characteristics:
- An open site with at least five hours of sun a day so that water plants can thrive.
- A site not too close to trees to avoid the maintenance of leaf and twig removal.
- A site offering proximity to an exterior electrical outlet and an exterior water faucet.
We located the pool in our front yard in full view of the most-used space in the house - the kitchen.
After the junipers were cleared, my son Michael and I spent some time fine-tuning the placement of the pool in relation to the house, existing plantings and two design elements we were going to add: a small berm and a flagstone path. Next, Mike outlined the pool in the dirt with a spade. He did this by standing inside the pool to make the silhouette as accurate as possible. We then removed the pool and followed the outline to dig the hole, making certain that the excavation had slightly sloping sides.
Most rigid pools are 18 inches deep, since a greater depth would, in some municipalities, require fencing for child safety. We dug a couple of inches deeper, trying to smooth the clay in the bottom as much as possible. We next poured 2-inches of sand on the bottom, spread it and leveled it with a short 2-by-4. We bedded the pond on the sand and leveled it with a carpenter's level. One end of the pool was down, so we lifted the pool out, poured more sand in that corner, reinserted the pool and leveled it again.
Next we began filling the pool with water as we backfilled with dirt and sand. Since our clay was hard and lumpy, I had purchased eight 80-pound bags of sand at the lumberyard and used a mixture of sand and clay to backfill. The advice we had received urged us to add water and backfill so that the two jobs would end simultaneously. The pool installation took a day.
Our pool does not have a built-in shelf, so we did not have to worry about supporting the shelf. With pools that have shelves (usually used to support pots of water plants), the shelf must be replicated in the excavation and fully supported with dirt or sand.
The next day we checked the pool with the level and made some minor adjustments in one corner. We also noticed that an awful lot of clay had fallen into the pool during the backfilling and the water had turned a muddy brown. Before we could decide what to do, the rains came and further work was postponed.
A week later I knew that the pool had to be emptied because of the mud we had inadvertently thrown in. The job, surprisingly, took about 15 minutes. I climbed into the pool and used a bucket to bail out the water, then wiped the sides clean with some old rags. I refilled the pool and began the fun part of the project - landscaping and planting.
Although we used a rigid liner, flexible plastic liners which enable you to design a pool of any size or shape are also on the market. A high density, UV-stable plastic liner for a pool with a 50-foot surface area would cost $85 to $150. This type of liner does not require any covering, except for coping stones or a cement apron around the surface perimeter of the pool. Fish can be used with this liner. A thinner liner that would be used under rock or cement to prevent seepage, or in a pond where no fish would be used, would cost about one-third of the above price.
To determine how much liner you would need, follow this formula: Double the depth of the pool and add one foot, then add this measurement both to the length and width of the pool. For example, a 9-by-12-foot pool 18 inches deep would require one 13-foot-wide liner that is 16 feet long.
Once the pool is installed, one other hardware item is usually necessary, while two others are optional. A garden pool needs a pump to aerate the water to prevent stagnation. A pump can be used in conjunction with a waterfall or with a fountain. I selected a fountain that attached to the pump and had an adjustable three-tier nozzle.
Water pumps range in price from $30 to $150 for the largest, while fountains cost $20 to $50. Besides a pump, a pool may need a thermostat heater to prevent the water from freezing in the winter. Heaters, which usually are simple heating coils, start at $15.
My plantings took two weekends and the flagstone path took a few hours.