April 2023

When we first moved to Crofton we made a pond.  A lovely big pond.  With different depths and ledges for plants, and plenty of room for fish.  You can see images of it when it was new below:

See? A gravel beach with planting all around.

20 years later:

Chaos.

Crofton Garden has never been an overly maintained garden.  Over the years things happen, gardens get neglected, you try to get it back under control, you fail and you keep trying.  And to be completely honest I think we just forgot what the pond looked like.  We knew it was there.  We saw it had become a muddy quagmire and had filled up with mud and plants making Agatha’s favourite spot to get muddy and cool, but we had forgotten how lovely it was.

It was Jenny who started to make some noises about cleaning it out.  Just a random statement every now and then.  Enough to plant a seed of thought though.  You see Jenny does that.  She plants ideas in your head.  She claims that she is going to do it.  It’ll all be fine.  Problem is she never starts quickly enough (or she starts too quickly which is another story) for me.  Autumn is our time to get stuff done in the garden and plant things out so everything has the Winter and Spring to get settled before Summer. 

And so, on my gardening day at Crofton, having just finished weeding the crappy dry garden where nothing really grows, I figured I’d have a crack at the large grass bit the grows out of the pond. 

It’s a cliché but all you have to do is start.  Even though it was wet and mucky, all the thuggish plants were confined by the pond shape and the plastic liner, which made it easier than I initially thought.  It was still a shit job though, but we all mucked in and over a couple of days we had it cleared.  It was amazing how much space had been taken up by the plants.  We had completely forgotten how large it was.  If there was ever a Lost Gardens of Heligan moment in our garden – this was it.

Jenny kicked into action with a new pond liner, statues in the garden were assessed for appropriateness and the shady site was deemed suitable for the numerous Japanese Maples we had struggling around the garden.

And what a difference it has made…

Ponds, especially ones with fish, are strangely hypnotic, like fires.  You just seem to end up at them and stare into their depths.  What was once a boggy wall of thuggish grasses and Arums is now a tranquil spot to stop, look and breathe.  It’s the best thing we have done in years.