High Falls, the Garden and the House: CHAPTER II : The Ponds

There are three ponds in High Falls. Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each a little smaller than the other.

Alpha is the larger of the three and the one I dug first.

Were the ponds there when you moved to High Falls?

I was aware there was a little spring fed stream or rather a dribble, in the back of the garden. I did not really pay any attention to it, ignorant as I was of the significance of an unlimited water supply on the grounds.

The stream flowed from a spring house on a knoll in the rear through a part of the garden I used to describe as T&M, "thistles & mosquitoes". Imagine how it felt to be there. Walking around meant stretching your hands in front of you for protection and moving thorned branches that had not seen a person in decades, away from your face.

As long as the water was a moving stream, it was difficult to harness and control it. Dutch boy that I was, I built a muddy dam with my hands and feet and 10 minutes later looked at a mini puddle pond three feet in diameter.

What a great idea. Now I could control the water.

In general, we have no control over when it rains or when it is dry. If you have no control over these basics and must cede it to nature, you have no control over the artificial environment of the garden. But with an unlimited water supply at my disposal, all of that would change. The next week, a big earth mover started to dig a hole that covered the complete back area by the spring house and after a while there was a real pond there: Alpha.

While digging, the bulldozer made a huge racket as its teethed bucket scraped over the Catskill bedrock, cleared a ramp into the deepest parts of the pond and exposed a trove of Devonian era fossils, the most magnificent of which was a coiled cephalopod. - roughly 380 million years old. Every time I walk into the pond on a hot summer day, I touch the old fossil with my bare feet. And even better, I walk on solid rock instead of the mucky bottom you'd expect in a natural pond.

We carved out a small island in the northern edge of Alpha to break monotony and planted a Cercidiphylum Japonicum Pendulum or Katsura tree, related to the American Redbud, in the middle of it. The physical description read it "liked its feet wet" so what better place to plant it than on its own island.

But after 4-5 years the tree outgrew the island with no further room for its roots to grow. To save the tree, I added a land bridge turning the island into a peninsula and giving the Cercidiphylum all the room to connect its root system to the dry mainland.

The ponds are fed by their own spring. Covered in a modest spring house with a bath sized container where the water bubbles up from the earth, the spring flows continuously, even through the longest dry spells. It took me several years to realize the value of my own endless water supply. Before I dug the ponds, the stream meandered harmlessly through the thicket before going underground. Not until it was contained in three ponds, did its value manifest itself.

A large 28-gallons-a-minute-pump in Beta distributes water as needed to the sprinklers in the Oval with the flick of a switch inside the house. The size of the Oval alone would make watering by hand impractical.

I have come to realize over the years that the spring and the ponds are the most essential elements in the garden. Nothing will thrive or live without a guaranteed supply of cool water so that after a 4-week midsummer drought, the High Falls garden looks fresh and the lawns moist and green.

Is the water in the ponds clear?

Whenever there is a natural body of water of some volume there is a lot of life. I stocked the pond with largemouth bass and triploid grass carp and the rest took care of itself. In early summer there will be what appear to be millions of tadpoles, on their way to become frogs, tree frogs, peeper frogs and toads. In the water there are crayfish, painted turtles, snakes, snails and zooplankton. Above the water there are pond skaters, mosquitoes, dragonflies, geese, ducks, heron and egret; and the last big snouted birds, together with the otters and maybe minks have reduced the number of fish in all the ponds quite a bit.

In deep-freeze winter when the areas around the pond are covered in snow, white-tailed deer come to drink the water that never freezes. It never goes below 40F (4C).

When I walk the edges of the pond, I see all of this animal life.

And then there is all the plant life. The wild blue and yellow iris found their way to the pond's edges on their own. I had nothing to do with it. I did plant the Gunnera and some of the ferns. Having their feet wet is just what they need and they will thrive still a hundred years from now...... The biggest plant life in the ponds are the algae.

Algae, like other plants are photosynthetic, meaning they grow explosively when the days get longer and warmer. A wonderful warm April day will witness a sudden explosion. I will get to the pond one morning and see a bright green pulsating blanket of gook covering large areas of the surface, sucking up all the oxygen and darkening the insides of the pond.

There are many remedies to battle the blanket and the one I like best is also the most magnificent one, having established itself over the years as the very recognizable symbol of the High Falls garden The Fountain.

The Fountain is a floating fountain, shooting up a simple jet 20 feet straight into the air, like the one in Lake Geneva. It is connected to a very well insulated electric wire on one side and a simple twine on the other. Pulling the fountain by the twine into one spot of the pond where the algae are very dense is a very simple way to battle the blanket. The mere gravity force of the water splashing down onto the algae will break up the very fabric the algae are made of. I can move the fountain around and battle the algae with the water they live off.

So, is it clear?

It is not clean or clear enough for drinking. All the animals use the water as their living environment and we know how dirty that can get.

But, I do use Alpha as my swimming pond on those wonderful 90F (33C) midsummer days where even minimal physical exertion will raise my body temperature to such a high level that the only thing I can think of is diving into eternally cool Alpha.

The pond is 10 feet deep at the diving pond.

Torrential Catskill thunder storms deposit successive cubic amounts of runoff silt into the pond. After some years I have had to remove all the gook at the bottom to make sure the pond maintains a certain depth. The excess silt was dumped in an area I now call the Alpha Garden, contained in a wall built with stones from the small quarries up the road. The soil is not very fertile as I had expected but with enough manure it is making do.

The Alpha Garden is still very young and I delight in watching it taking on its own shape. I am developing a dad's pride of it.