Here is the whole WSJ article.


Patience Runs Dry
With Water Gardens

By EILEEN WHITE READ
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal Online
When Paul Dougherty put a water garden behind his Washington, D.C., home, he
imagined he was building himself an oasis, a quiet spot where he could sit and
gaze at the lotus blossoms as brightly colored koi fish swam below.
Some oasis: Now, every morning at 6, he rises to test the water in his pond,
then adds chemicals to counteract chlorine. His bills have climbed north of
$20,000, as he's shelled out for water filters, sterilizers and the like, not
to mention last month's $200 bill for an emergency house call from the fish
veterinarian. Yes, the fish veterinarian: Three of his prized koi had ulcers.
"If somebody had told me from Day One that it would be like this, I would have
said, 'You're out of your mind,'" says Mr. Dougherty, a commercial real-estate
agent.
Water gardening has been one of the biggest backyard fads of the past decade.
According to the National Gardening Association, U.S. spending on water gardens
-- which can range from a simple goldfish pond to an elaborate contemplative
garden of waterfalls and streams edged in bluestone -- climbed to $806 million
in 1999, twice what it was in 1995. With prices plummeting due to "instant-pond
kits" and mail-order supplies, three million homeowners decided to put in a
"water feature," between 1998 and 1999 alone, raising the total number of
households with artificial fish ponds in the country to seven million. Even
drugstores these days are peddling liquid algae cleaner, in case you've run
out.
But the trend has left lots of folks feeling soaked, as many backyards are now
graced not by a Zen meditation site, but a leaking pond, a mess of overgrown
algae and the bodies of very expensive, lifeless fish. "When a person sees or
reads about water gardens, they sound pretty simple," says San Diego landscape
architect Andrew Spurlock. But the reality, he says, is far more difficult. Mr.
Spurlock knows from experience. Though he helped design the intricate water
gardens at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, when it came to his own
pond, "the pump would bog down from debris, there was the mess of cleaning it
every three weeks, and we had algae and dead fish," he says. When he recently
bought a new house, Mr. Spurlock decided he could do without a pond. "It's time
that I'd rather spend working in the garden," he says.
Nature Strikes Back
Terry Birkel knows the feeling. The Washington attorney used to love the
free-form ponds connected by a waterfall in his backyard. Then nature struck
back: One night, after Mr. Birkel cleaned the pond, he forgot to refill it all
the way. Local raccoons waded in and helped themselves to a dozen of his costly
koi (price per fish: as much as $300). He came out to find "fish carcasses all
over the yard," he says. Then he inadvertently killed some more fish himself,
first by filling the pond with chlorinated water (koi count: 15) and then by
putting in weed killer (another dozen dead). "It got to the point where I would
go out in the morning and just be glad not to see any of [the fish] floating
dead in the water," he says.
Before the early '60s, an ornamental pond was "typically a luxury item of the
rich, because you had to have a concrete foundation and plumbing underneath,"
says Charles Thomas, author of "Water Gardens." Putting one in usually cost
thousands of dollars. That all changed with the development of flexible pond
liners and submersible pumps and filters. The trend took off in the U.S. during
the '80s along with the craze for chateau-size mansions. It was fueled even
further by the development of "instant-pond kits," which let homeowners do it
themselves for as little as $100.
Thomas Williams and his son built three cascading ponds in their backyard with
just $900 in supplies bought from the Arizona Aquatic Gardens Web site. They
looked great until one morning when the Tempe, Ariz., banker noticed that one
of the ponds had collapsed overnight, spewing 1,500 gallons of water and
exposing the filter and the roots of his plants. Mr. Williams and his wife
waded into the "yucky mud, thigh deep," to slowly reassemble the pond's walls
with concrete blocks and dry dirt. His bargain-basement garden suddenly got a
lot more expensive: The price of his wife's help was a 10-day trip with their
daughter to Hawaii, without Mr. Williams.
And if putting a water garden in has gotten easier, maintaining one hasn't. To
keep a pond in good health, the water has to be tested daily, the bottom should
be cleaned weekly, and -- most onerous of all -- the whole thing needs to be
drained and completely scrubbed once a year. Not surprisingly, pond-technology
makers have released a flood of fancy gadgets designed to make life easier,
from high-tech filters to ultraviolet sterilizers, vacuum cleaners and "leaf
eaters" that clean debris on the bottom. Once people in colder climates started
putting in the ponds, they also needed things like de-icers -- winter heaters
that keep water gardens from freezing over completely.
A Haven of Beauty
Still, the calming, meditative quality of a backyard pond can be hard to
resist. Scott Hertzog, a salesman in Emmaus, Pa., enlarged his tiny pond four
times until he got it to a size that felt just right. Of his fifth, and
seemingly final pond, he says, "I fit this haven of overwhelming beauty in a
10-foot-by-30-foot area." And indeed, nationwide water garden sales are still
climbing at 10% to 15% per year, says PK Data, an Atlanta market research firm.
One reason: Even as the economy slows overall, Americans are continuing to make
their gardens a priority.
And according to Mr. Thomas, the garden-book author, the chief source of
water-garden failures is, ironically, fish, not plants. He says pond
aficionados quickly become fish fanciers and invest in a school of koi, which
can grow 12 inches long and produce too much waste for their small, contained
environment. Instead of "spending thousands of dollars on all kinds of filters
and things" to support big fish, Mr. Thomas advises water gardeners to focus on
the flowers and perhaps a few small goldfish -- at least it'll cut down on the
bills from the fish doctor.
That doesn't mean much to Kim Lindsey in Bronson, Mich. Every night this year,
she's gone to bed yearning for "the gentle, soothing sounds of running water."
Instead, from dusk until dawn, she's been harangued by the croaking of a dozen
toads, squatters among the rocks around her lily pond. She can't get rid of
them -- her sons like to feed them worms and watch them jump. "I actually had a
headache when the mating season was in full swing," she says. "They made more
noise than an eight-lane highway.

k30a
and the watergardening labradors
http://www.geocities.com/watergarden...dors/home.html