I have made a couple myself, and a few with others.
Really it is hard to sary without an idea of what you want.
You can go totally natural looking, making the whole lot with bush rocks, or
go the typical fibreglass ponds with small pockets for the waterfall.


If you are going to build something up, then pack your earth to the
shape, retaining walls, etc.

Plastic liner under the rocks is a good trick because that is what stops
your water leaking away. apart from a large water bill, leaking water
also saturates the soil and causes eveything to sump.

Your bottom pool/sump pool has to be big enough to hold all the water
when the power goes off and it all runs down.

If you go fibreglass/pebble coated stuff, buy individual pools, lips,
water falls, rather than a fixed thing. I made the mistake of buying a
fixed three tier thing and it was a pain to get levels correct.

For this, I had concrete block base (undisturbed soil at ground level)
and risers of 100mm sewerage pipe filled with concrete capped/packed
with concrete slabs, fibro or slate (all unseen) and, that was
surrounded by soil backfill into genuine railway sleeper retaining walls
on 3 sides. The back fill settles each year and I just top it up all the
time.

As said before, you need lots of rocks to play around with and get the
right feel. Ideally they should all be the same. Although, mine now has
conglomerate around the top pool, sandstone around the 2nd and third,
then large rounded river rock around the sump/(old bathtub) and it goes
together okay.

As said before; mortar, you want as little as possible because it
doesn't hold long term (different thremal expansion rates). As best, you
are making a holding cradle to stop round rocks moving.


I still have to solve the problem of colour filtering as we have a
number of large gums dropping lots of leaves into the water. I am
considering a large plastic barrell with straw packing for this.