Hi all,
I am planning to put a small wetland into my backyard and need some help with the design.
As the yellow outline in the photo shows, it is going to go into the rear corner of my yard, in an area that is 4m wide by 5.4m long. The ground gradually slopes by about 300mm from the back to the front.
What I have in mind is two (possibly three) shallow pools each holding about 50-100mm of visible water, and those being planted with aquatic plants such as rushes. This would attract birds and frogs.
The rear pond would feed the lower pond with small waterfalls through gaps in a dividing ring of natural looking rocks.
A complicating factor is that there is a stormwater drain easement at the rear of the section (indicated by the red line) I cannot dig deep holes into this and would effectively need to build up and over it. Therefore the upper pond is effectively at or slightly above the ground level.
At the moment my plan is to dig a small trench as part of the lower pond (say 1.2m deep) along the front of the marked area and fill with gravel and aquablox - to use this as an underground reservoir in the same way as a pondless waterfall. Then I’d pump the water from the bottom of that trench back up to the top pool - possibly with a small waterfall unit dispensing it at the top/rear. But this would mean the water passed downward through the gravel wetland filter rather than upwards as most wetland filters seem to work. Is this possible?
Also, I haven’t seen a lot of designs like this using shallow water (noting the lower pond will have a deeper section hidden under the gravel). Is this possible?
Thanks for any thoughts.
