A TIMELY POND
THE long rains of the past twelve months have left in their wake more than one curious and suggestive hint for the " happy gardener "who is an adept at sucking advantage out of any soil or climate. In one Hertfordshire garden a particular low-lying bed became, early in the year, too thoroughly water-logged for any sort of cultiva- tion; and though it had previously grown flowers only, it is to-day thick with rushes and some sedges. It has re- lapsed at the very first opportunity to the state of the marshes of the Lea valley in which it is situate. How the rushes and sedge came into being there is a mystery beyond the gardener's penetration, though, in one form or another, the mystery is repeated again and again. Two years after the War, in a journey from Ypres to Dixmude and Pervyse, the walker skirted round pond after round pond all fringed with reeds and rushes, as if the country had been the haunt of coot and hem for generations. In the most hopelessly shell-ruined places, which were an archipelago of ponds, frogs were so numerous that they drew flocks of wild duck ; and as you stepped with neces- sary circumspection, the sound of their dives - as they plopped from the bank into the water was as continuous as had been the shell fire on a day of battle.
Such a relapse as this means that we can only keep our Edens by continual work ; but this human fate has its compensations, at least for the gardener ; for it also means that he can restore some of the charms of wildness to any piece of ground he wishes, however sophisticated, with little labour. You cannot "expel nature with a fork," but you can improve it with a spade. Some of the Belgian peasants at once began to compose delightful little water-gardens out of the shell holes ; and in imita- tion of them, with the help of a hint from the effects of a year of heavy rain, the marshy spot in Hertfordshire is being permanently transformed into what the weather has made it. Water is the eye of scenery ; and a pond in a garden has more than merely picturesque virtues. It is quite incredibly popular with nearly all the nature h..- habitants—even birds and mice and bees—as well as with its proper denizens.
A garden pond will to some extent stock itself. Animals arrive as mysteriously as reeds and rushes. Less than a week after the first few spadefuls of soaked earth were removed from the rush patch in the Lea valley garden the place was populous with newts. They were the very first newts the gardener had noticed in the locality ; and though this was doubtless due to the deficiency of his observation, it was at least curious that the neighbours became so soon aware of the new home. The frogs, who have the best nose for water—they even surpass the Australian Blacks—will quite certainly cast their spawn there before April comes. Incidentally, how is it that the frog is in so close accord with astronomical dates ? Its standard day for laying is March 22nd—when the calendar says that spring begins. Probably the plants —callitriche for example—in which newts especially delight to conceal their eggs, will make an appearance in time to be useful for this secondary purpose. The water buttercup often comes unasked, and the spontaneous arrival of that handsome weed, the water plantain, is recorded in some of our annals. But the gardener is no more content with native products in his pond than in his beds ; and in these days animals may be purchased with little more trouble than plants, though the cata- logues do not arrive automatically and in multitudes. It happened to the writer to call one summer day at the Cambridgeshire house of a famous naturalist-gardener, who regards his many varieties of pheasant as not less proper to the garden than his strange plants. On this day he was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a consignment of "three thousand sticklebacks "—surely the strangest order ever given by a gardener ! But it was a very good one. Children are not always wrong ; and it would be difficult to discover a child who after once being intro- duced to that engaging, ingenious, militant little fish— which he usually calls a sticklyback—did not find it an absorbing interest. A yet more successful adventure in pond-stocking was made about the same time in an Isle of Wight garden. A great number of various dragon fly were introduced into two ponds, and the species so flourished that in ensuing years, when the season came round, you could make quite sure of seeing the final emergence of the perfect insect—the most spectacular of all the metamorphoses of our natural history. The bright wings and flashing coat of mail added only less to the charm of that corner of the garden than the climbing roses that encircled the pool at a slight remove.
The "unearned increment" of a garden pond is incal- culable. It will certainly draw the pied, and may— expert° crede—draw the grey wagtail, one of the loveliest birds we see. Scores of living things come to drink there : insects, birds, mammals. The maker of a delightful wild American garden, some fifty miles west of New York, used-to sand a pathway to the edge of his favourite pond (it had an island with an "observation tree" in the middle), and each morning he would go down, one day at least with a very interested guest, and trace the little tracks. Then he would reconstruct the adventures of the night and early morning, and could be quite sure of deciphering from the prints in the sand exactly what species of mouse or rat or bird had gone down to drink.
The pond need not be elaborate. A lily or two and a reed or two ; an island stone or low place where bird and mouse and humble bee may drink ; a firm edge—these are the essentials. As for size, a man of science in Hamp- stead made a microcosm of a water garden two feet by one and found daily interest in it. Any pond is better than no pond for every man or woman or child who has any itch to be either gardener or naturalist. It serves at all times of the year. It is best perhaps when you can dabble in it and fish up the dytiscus beetle or watch the shiny beetles skid their eccentric way across the smooth surface. But it is a gay place in spring, when toad and frog and newt come to spawn ; and in winter, when all the garden is dead, it catches the gleam of the daffodil sky and can be admired merely for the mirror that it is, without thought of the life that hides in it or the stems of the lilies that will rise from it.
W. B. T.
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