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Adrian Thomas

I received an urgent phone call in the week from some good friends with a plea for help - their beloved pond had sprung a leak, half the water had gone (right), and what should they do?

Now this time of year isn't the best from a wildlife point of view to go emptying a pond (summer is better), but when you've got a leak and the existing liner is old, thin and brittle, there's nothing for it but to get in there and change it rather than try to patch any holes.

So they bought in a big square of modern butyl liner calculated to the basic formula (pond width + 2x maximum depth) x (pond length + 2 x maximum depth), plus some fibre underlay and bags of sand. And yesterday we spent six hours getting VERY messy indeed.

It's a great little pond. Well, not so little actually, being about six feet across in both directions. And it's full of shoals of ornamental goldfish including a whopper called Chunk. Now the normal advice is that a wildlife pond is best without fish, but these were inherited with the pond, and it's not an absolute golden rule anyway. As long as wildlife has somewhere to hide, a goldfish pond can still add a great deal in terms of wildlife to the garden.

It took over two hours to empty the already half-empty pond (left), and even then two large water butts and the world record collection of buckets was not enough to take all the water (now there's a golden rule: never underestimate the volume of water even a small pond holds!). And the wildlife finds were fascinating. Seven Frogs, one Toad, about a dozen Emperor Dragonfly nymphs, one damselfly nymph, and a thousand or so Water Lice (the pond equivalent of Woodlice).

It was then a race against time before nightfall to

  • clear out the old liner
  • put some builders' sand into the shell of the pond to provide a good smooth base and sides, especially where the previous liner had butted up against raw flints!
  • put in and pleat into position some fibre underlay (to try and prevent future tears in the liner)
  • lay in the new liner (right)
  • create some dens made of bricks and smooth rocks where smaller fish and water creatures can hide (my friends dubbed this the Lost City of Atlantis)
  • then get all the water and then buckets of fish and wildlife back into the pond
  • and net the pond so that the Herring Gulls can't get at the fish and wildlife while it is still half empty (left).

So far, so good. There's plenty of tidying to be done to hide the edges and neaten the surrounds, and of course there's rain to be prayed for. But fingers crossed no casualties, and they've hopefully got  the makings of a pond to last 15 years or more before needing such upheaval again.