Fourseasonsgarden's Blog

Blog 16 - Making the lower stream

Posted on 30 Apr, 2008 8 comments

The lower garden in 1994. We finished planting and making paths edged with logs and filled with bark. We put a large wooden bridge on one of the paths. We then decided that the bridge should go over something – perhaps a short stream? I’m afraid we don’t do things by halves!!! The initial 8ft stream just grew and grew and ended up as 48ft. This is how we did it!


In 2001 we started at the bottom and created the hole for a 75 gallon sump and 3000 gallons an hour pump


I did have comments like: “when you’re in a hole you’ve got to know when to stop digging”!!! I dug down until I reached bedrock and then had to call it a day. It wasn’t easy digging and getting the soil out of such a confined area. The children had a great time modelling the clay!












This is the view from our little summer house


The birds don’t realise we are so close!


We worked our way up the stream, doing sections at a time. We didn’t want to use plastic sheeting so used concrete and York stone paving instead.



We hammered small triangles of rock and paving slabs into the stream bed to stabilise the soil and used reinforcing iron in the concrete.








We only had a drop of 3ft along the main stream bed so each section had to be fairly long, with a small drop.


We created some planting holes in the concrete edge by cementing around plant pots to keep the shape.




We needed another bridge as the stream crossed a second path.


How were we going to start the stream? It wouldn’t look right just coming up out of the ground. We built a mound by importing large rocks, some weighing two and a half hundred weight each. We also brought in 11 tons of top soil!






There was a sense of urgency to get it finished since we were going on holiday to China in October. We set up a gazebo and lights and worked well into the evenings in September.


We bought five sections of precast concrete to make the cascade – we weren’t confident that our concrete would remain watertight if the mound settled. At least with the precast sections it would allow for movement in the soil. The only problem was that the middle section of the five leaked! We took it back to the garden centre some distance away – only to find that all the similar sections they had leaked as well! We went off for a pub lunch whilst someone from the garden centre raced off a considerable distance to their supplier to find a sound section!!








2002


2007

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