Building A River In The Garden

Grandma Cottage absolutely loved Jesus, ponds, and roses so when we moved to this house 18+ years ago she was thrilled. There was plenty of room for ponds and a rose garden! We had a convenient, rather large gully in our yard that always collected water and was a pain to mow. Just like that, the idea for the big pond was born. We tried a hard plastic liner, but Mr. Cottage just didn't care for it so we pulled it back out and dug the hole wider and got a rubber pond liner. We covered the edges with rocks a variety of rocks (most of those are from our yard believe it or not). Originally we had a river behind the waterfall so the water traveled down it and then over the waterfall but we ended up changing it to what you see now. 

A while later we added a small little plastic pond further down the path, again we didn't end up liking it so we removed it and used a rubber liner and covered the edges with rocks. Grandma always wanted to add a river between the two ponds but we never got around to it- until now. Last week after several days of rain I decided to make her dream a reality.  

This is the pathway and patio before we started our project, the bushes have grown out enough that it was annoying to walk down the path. We put our cowboy grill and extra chairs from our outdoor table out here so we could enjoy the evenings.

Related Article: Beginnings Of The Cottage

We already had some of the landscaping done, with some slight transplanting we had it set.

We pulled up 4 rows of stones along the walkway to the pool and all the stepping stones along the path.

We dug the outline out slightly so we could see it, once we got the angles and layout right we went ahead and continued digging.

We decided to have the river cascade at this point into the smaller pond. We removed the rocks on the end and dug a ditch 4 inches deep to the big pond. Don't worry that isn't the water line on the smaller pool we drained it to get the gunk off the bottom from several years of just sitting there.

We got a little too wide so we ended up backfilling and raising sections to 10 inches tall.

Related Article: Cottage Garden Tour

We picked up 2 rubber liners from Lowes, and attached them together with tape (also from Lowes) then spread it down the ditch making sure it was well over the sides. We tried to get as many wrinkles out of it as possible. We saved digging out the section next to the big pond for last so we wouldn't have water everywhere. We ended up cutting some of the excess off the side of the liner and using a piece to help cover the seam between the pond and river so we wouldn't have any leaks. Next, we added rocks, one of the very few good things about having a rocky yard.

It took a little adjusting to get the flow right, but after some shifting and digging we got it working right and began thinking about landscaping!

Here is another view of the river flowing down to the little pond.

We stopped by our local Lowes and found some beautiful flowers on clearance for 50% off and "adopted" them for this space.

The brown mulch was also on sale so we went with that to mulch around the pond. I love how rich the color is!

Mr. Cottage also built a bridge for us [Tutorial coming soon!]! We also brought two of our butterfly benches out to the patio and some cute garden art. It's so nice to sit out here in the evenings and watch the dragonflies and butterflies dance through the air and listen to the water!

Do you have a water feature in your garden?