On a warm July evening, a group of us gathered in the gardens at The Charterhouse to do something quietly radical. We made ponds. Small ones. The kind you could fit on a balcony, tuck into a paved corner, or sink into a raised bed in a community garden.
The workshop was led by Jack Jeans, Garden Education Officer at Walworth Garden, and it brought together London National Park City Rangers and Clerkenwell Pollinator Path volunteers. The Pollinator Path is stitching flowering spaces together across Clerkenwell so bees and butterflies can move through the city. Ponds are the missing piece of that puzzle. Water is where a huge amount of urban life begins, and it is disappearing fast.
Why this matters
Here is the sobering bit. Around a third of the UK’s ponds have vanished in the last fifty years. Our wetlands, home to some of the rarest wildflowers that pollinators depend on, have declined by close to 90 per cent in the last century. Mechanised farming, the loss of hedgerows and a century of pesticides and fertilisers have drained the countryside of the wet, wild places that so much wildlife needs.
Now the hopeful bit. Roughly two thirds of our freshwater species can live in garden ponds. Which means the spaces we look after, however small, can become genuine refuges. A cluster of little container ponds across a community garden can support more biodiversity than one big pond, because so many creatures are perfectly content in a bucket’s worth of water.
What we learned
Jack spent the evening busting a few myths. You do not need a big garden. You do not need fish, which actually eat the invertebrates and amphibian eggs you are trying to attract. And you do not need pumps, filters or endless maintenance. A wildlife pond mostly wants to be left alone.
A few ideas stuck with me.
Container ponds are made for London. Where the ground is paved, polluted or full of buried services, you simply build the pond up instead of digging it down. An old butler sink, a half barrel or a trug will do.
Keep it clean and keep it hungry. The single most common mistake is adding rich soil, which floods the water with nutrients and turns it green with algae and duckweed. Wash the compost off your plants, plant into washed sand and shingle, and top up with rainwater rather than tap.
The edges are everything. The richest life is found in the shallows and at the margins. A wavy edge holds far more habitat than a neat circle, and a bumpy profile creates a drawdown zone that shifts and changes through the seasons.
Then we got our hands wet and built one, bare-rooting the plants, layering the substrate, setting stones for birds and beetles to clamber over, and adding a log as a dragonfly perch. Within a season, that small bowl of water will be busy.
Watch, read and make your own
We filmed the whole workshop, and it is the best way to see the mini pond come together step by step. To go alongside it, we have put together a companion guide that gathers everything in one place: the why, the how, a planting guide by zone, the materials to use and reuse, and where to take it further.
Watch the film, download the guide, and then find yourself a container. A washing-up bowl really can become a nature reserve.
Huge thanks to Jack Jeans and Walworth Garden, to The Charterhouse for hosting, and to everyone who came along and got muddy.
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