Edging Types
The edge of a wildife pond is part of the pond that does need a bit of thinking, and it can be the part which is hard to make look nice, at least straight away.
The edging serves the following purposes:
- To hide the unsightly liner / overlay and give a more natural and attractive look.
- To protect any exposed liner, although ideally there shouldn’t be any liner exposed.
Dry Stone Wall edging
If you have steps at the edge in your pond and you have enough rocks and stones you can lay a mini dry stone wall starting as far below the water level as possible. This gives a very attractive natural look especially when the stones starts to attract moss. If you start the wall some depth below the water line, the wall will to continue hide the underliner when the water level drops in the hotter weather.
This photo illustrates dry wall type edging, note the wall starts well below the water line.
This not only looks great, but it also provides lots of hidy holes for creatures such as frogs and newts.
Cutaway of dry wall edging
The downside is it does take quite a lot of rocks which can be expensive if you are buying them or time consuming if you are scavenging them. This type of edging takes additional time to plan and build although the end result can be very satisfying
Simple earth and plant edging
The pond edges are covered in earth and planted up with grass and edging plants. This is very simple and it is really easy to do. The downside is the liner and underlay will be more exposed. Plants and grass around the edge are prone to draw water lowering the pond level more quickly than evaporation alone.
Rocks or stones edging
This is the most common for nature ponds as it is pretty straightforward and looks good. The downside is the liner is harder to cover and will certainly become more visible in summer as the evaporation causes the level to drop.
Lay the edge.
If you have carved steps into the top of the pond then, now you can loosely lay your pond edging rocks into the steps in the approximate positions. You don’t have to make this the entire finished article at this stage as this is just to give you an idea of how it is going to look and hold the liner and overlay into postion and prevent it popping up, moving or generally flapping about.