The Variegated Thumb

My parents-in-law own a very beautiful wedding chapel in the woods outside of town.  The chapel itself is a wood and rock structure with huge windows looking out to the dense trees and vegetation around it.  My wife and I help maintain the landscaping by weeding the flowerbeds about once a week.  We also recently installed a garden waterfall, like the one that we have in our front yard.  The waterfall area has been in construction for a while.  You can see that there is plenty of weeding for us to do just to the right of the falls.

The new garden waterfall at Thunderbird Chapel

The chapel has several sandstone walkways around it, so we incorporated some of the sandstone, along with the more commonly used river rocks.  The scale might be hard to deduce from these photos.  The height of the top is probably about 4 feet from the ground level and the length of the waterfall is about 8 feet from the water top to the edge of the basin.

Close-up of the waterfall

While weeding the flowerbeds we have seen a lot of frogs.  There is a pond nearby, but not really in hopping distance.  I think they will really appreciate the addition of this waterfall to their neighborhood.

This is just a quick post to show how my garden waterfall looked most of last week with our winter weather.

My garden waterfall in winter

We had ice pellets, sleet and just a little bit of freezing rain that resulted in a good 3-4 inches of ice accumulation that stayed for more than a week in many places.

The waterfall slowed to a trickle for most of the week, as much of the water was frozen.  By the end of the week, it became a roaring waterfall again as melt water from the roof flooded the waterfall and caused even the ice in the shade to melt.

[For any curious readers, I leave my waterfall on a timer year-round.  It clicks on and starts running around 7:45 am and turns off around 7 pm or so.  During the summer I extend the time so that it turns off around sunset (as late as 9 pm).  I don't have to worry about freezes because the pump that recycles the water is about 3 feet down and even when the temperature drops down into single digits overnight (on a rare occasion), the water usually stays liquid at a depth of 3 feet.]

If you missed my post on building my garden waterfall, you can read it here.

During the summer of 2007 my wife and I decided to install a waterfall in our front flowerbed against our house. The flowerbed is about 8′ by 20′ and was filled with irises, monkey grass (Liriope muscari), a rose bush, a holly bush (tree), and 2 large hardy (dinner-plate) hibiscus.  I dug up the rose bush and gave it to my in-laws who said they could find a place for it.  I relocated most of the iris to one location and gave some of them away.  I also moved around quite a bit of the monkey grass so that it just formed an outline of the flowerbed.  There also is a large patch of dense monkey grass under the holly tree at the other end of the flowerbed.  I didn’t have to disturb that end.

Front flowerbed before waterfall project

As far as the mechanical elements, we got a “pondless waterfall kit” at a local landscaping shop that specializes in ponds and waterfalls.  It was on sale for a really good deal.  However, the price of some necessary items not included in the kit can be costly.  The kit itself contains 2 different layers of underlayment - a very thick rubber tarp and a more thin fiber layer.  The fiber layer goes first, and then the rubber tarp next.  Also included in the kit is the water pump and housing, a long stretch of tubing (about 6-8 feet, I would guess), the top waterfall container, and all of the necessary fittings to piece it together.  Really, the construction of the mechanical pieces took just 30 minutes or so.  Attaching the tarp to the top container was a little tricky and very important to do well, since most “leaks” will occur there.  I have had to mess with it a little since I have finished the waterfall, making tweaks whenever I noticed some water was straying from the intended path and slipping underneath the tarp.

In order to “build” this waterfall, I needed to create the correct landscape.  Since I just had a flat bed, this required a bunch of dirt.  Thankfully a couple of neighbors happened to be making some changes of their own, resulting in large piles of dirt in their yards.  One neighbor down the street was taking out a large raised bed that ran half the length of the front of the house.  I’m not sure how I lucked in to this situation, but it happened.  They were appreciative of my hauling off their dirt and I was thankful for the free dirt.  I did have to haul it down the street in a wheel barrow, though.  Load by load by load by load by load…

Anyway, I was able to build a nice hill in the corner of the bed that would serve as my miraculous hillock of bubbling clear water!

Waterfall preparation

A friend of ours has a lot of land that contains some rock that he said we were welcome to have.  Rock is one of those extra ingredients not included in the kit and it is quite expensive to buy.  I called some are landscape suppliers and priced rock - then quickly took our friend up on his offer.  We had to drive about an hour to the land and spent most of a Saturday finding rocks of varying sizes that were somewhat consistent in coloring and looked like they would create a nice waterfall.  We were very happy with our free rocks and free help that we received, as well.

Laying out the underlayment to form the basin

You can see a large bud in the lower right corner of the picture and another in the center of the right side of the picture.  This is one of my dinner plate hibiscus.  The hibiscus were beautiful when they bloomed but up until that day it looked like a huge weed had grown to 3 or 4 feet tall right there in the middle of our front window on the house.  So I removed the hibiscus shortly after installing the waterfall.

After putting all of the equipment together and positioning the tarp, I filled up the bottom basin with water and plugged in the pump.  It worked!

Now it was time to start experimenting with rock layouts.  I probably spent about an hour until I had all of the rocks in a layout that pleased my eye.  Then I went and got my wife for an inspection.  She made tweaks here and there.  Then I took the bags of river pebbles that we had bought and filled in all of the areas between rocks where the underlaying tarp was exposed.  There were lots of crooks and crannies and we ended up needing more bags of pebbles than we had initially purchased.  Thankfully the bags of pebbles are pretty cheap ($3ish for a large bag).  Once the pebbles were in place the waterfall really looked good.

Complete waterfall

Of course, the finishing touches were to get some aquatic plants and to landscape around the waterfall.

Waterfall color

Waterfall top

At the onset of spring this last year I looked out the window one morning to see a bunch of birds playing/showering in our waterfall.

Birds at play(?) in the waterfall - or maybe just bathing

I’m not much of a bird watcher, so I don’t know what type of birds these are, but I really liked their markings, so I took a couple of pictures of them.

I like the markings on these birds - anyone know what they are?

Though the word “natural” may not be the best word to use for the waterfall surging out of the little hillock perfectly mounded against our red brick house - the scene has an authentic look to it.  The rocks are native to our region and we landscaped around the waterfall with evergreen plants that should keep our front flowerbed beautiful year in and year out with minimal maintenance.  In fact, the front flowerbed is really pretty all through the winter, even when everything else seems brown and dead.

My wife and I posing after our hard work