Backyard Water Gardens is a complete overview of everything you need to know in order to create a backyard water feature, from ideas, to installation, to maintaining, to stocking with plants and fish.

How to design and create water gardens, ponds, and fountains. Over 490 color photographs and illustrations.

Before starting your water feature, learn from these detailed case studies that depict actual gardens progressing from planning to planting, using only modest building skills.

With 700 beautiful color photos, this is the definitive photographic reference to the full range of plants available to the water gardener.

Bring life and movement to your outdoor living space with the sparkle and cool serenity of water. Alan and Gill Bridgewater show you how to add ponds, pools, cascades, waterspouts, and more to your garden or yard. With step-by-step instructions for 16 easy projects that include a classic wall-mounted fountain spout, a Japanese-style bamboo water pump, and even a container bog garden, you’ll soon be building a stylish water feature that’s perfectly suited to your landscape.

Everyone loves a garden filled with bright colors, soft textures, and lovely smells. Add a little water to the mix and you have the perfect spot to relax and enjoy the best of nature. Relaxing by your water garden is the end of a long but rewarding process. Follow these step-by-step instructions for finding the best spot in your yard for a healthy water garden, designing and digging it, choosing water flowers, and adding fish. You can even build a toad house to attract wild visitors to your backyard. When all the designing, digging, lining, planting, and stocking is done, you can sit in your own private oasis and enjoy nature’s gorgeous bounty. Color, movement, scent—it all adds up to life!

Build a natural pond for wildlife, beauty, and quiet contemplation Typical backyard ponds are a complicated mess of pipes, pumps, filters, and nasty chemicals designed to adjust pH and keep algae at bay. Hardly the bucolic, natural ecosystem beloved by dragonflies, frogs, and songbirds. The antidote is a natural pond, free of hassle, cost, and complexity and designed as a fully functional ecosystem, ideal for biodiversity, swimming, irrigation, and quiet contemplation. Building Natural Ponds is the first step-by-step guide to designing and building natural ponds that use no pumps, filters, chemicals, or electricity and mimic native ponds in both aesthetics and functionality. Highly illustrated with how-to drawings and photographs, coverage includes: Understanding pond ecosystems and natural algae control Planning, design, siting, and pond aesthetics Step-by-step guidance for construction, plants and fish, and maintenance and trouble shooting Scaling up to large ponds, pools, bogs, and rain gardens. Whether you're a backyard gardener looking to add a small serene natural water feature or a homesteader with visions of a large pond for fish, swimming, and irrigation, Building Natural Ponds is the complete guide to building ponds in tune with nature, where plants, insects, and amphibians thrive in blissful serenity. Robert Pavlis , a Master Gardener with over 40 years of gardening experience, is owner and developer of Aspen Grove Gardens, a six-acre botanical garden featuring over 2,500 varieties of plants. A well-respected speaker and teacher, Robert has published articles in Mother Earth News , Ontario Gardening magazine, the widely read blog GardenMyths.com, which explodes common gardening myths and gardening information site GardenFundamentals.com.