May 2005
The Zen of Ponds
Lessons in balance
from the wisdom of water
by Jonn Salovaara
Spring is when ponds and other wetlands come into their own. At this time, it can seem as if a pond is where the season of spring is born in the first place. The pond is like the womb of creation, the moist interior of Mother Earth where life both floral and faunal begins the process of evolution all over again. As in Genesis, the spirit of creation hovers over this water. Rains, both directly from sky to pond, and indirectly through soaking into the ground, freshen and enlarge everything from marshes and bogs to rivers and lakes.
Even before the advance of spring — the full leafing of the trees, the final warming of the weather, the abundance of wildflowers — you can hear frogs twanging on the grassy edges of many wetlands and plopping into the water when you walk by. Soon their tadpoles — or toad tadpoles — appear, like black monster spermatozoa in the shallows. Lily pads and cattails and all kinds of vegetation reappear. Waterfowl — wood ducks and Canada geese — arrive to nest under brambles along shores. A great blue heron may decide to take a break from hunting along rivers to hang out along a wetland. At a pond you can experience the circle of creation. Toads and frogs feed their predators. Insects reproduce in the water, feeding fish and attracting even more birds.
It isn’t only the life of plants and animals, or even the color and light that attract us to bodies of water. Henry David Thoreau, that famous pond-dweller, believed that ponds reacted upon the imagination of humans, that humans themselves were deeper for imagining ponds to be deep, even if those imaginings were inaccurate. (Walden Pond was 107 feet down at its deepest point, according to Thoreau’s measurement with a cod-line and a one-pound stone, not bottomless as some neighbors seemed to believe).
But you don’t need to camp out on the edge of Walden Pond to experience pond magic. You really only need a birdbath outside your door, or maybe just a large bucket of water, to experience some of this firsthand.
The basin of my garden’s fountain develops pond-like characteristics within days. Birds and squirrels perch on the edge of the cement dish to bathe or drink on warm afternoons. Leaves collect in the bottom, and unless I keep it cleaned out, larvae of mosquitoes (or some insect) are soon squiggling around in the dissolving leaves. The water starts to look like Coke coming out of the fountain.
This natural decay — in part a prelude to new life — contributes to the fascination of ponds both large and small. It can also contribute to ambivalence about wetlands. In any case, the muck at the bottom of ponds and lakes stirs our imagination. Who knows what evil lurks down there where the leaves and twigs collect? It’s not just a fear of microorganisms or stepping on a rusty can that someone has carelessly tossed aside. The fear is part primordial, of Loch Ness Monsters both large and small, and the great murky unknown itself.
I once had to walk through my own fear of this stuff to clean out a culvert between two sections of my mom’s pond in West Virginia. “It’s only leaves and twigs,” I had to keep repeating.
One of the tricks of maintaining a backyard pond is to establish a balance, so that algae don’t take over, among other things. If you are using a naturalistic approach, you need both submerged plants as well as water lilies and plants that rise above the surface of the water. The submerged plants add oxygen and provide a place for fish to breed. And fish can be a natural key to filter the water and control mosquito larvae.
Of course, you can also rely on periodic skimming, cleaning or changing of the water. For this you might want to have a pump and filter. A small pump not only aerates the water, it can also provide sound. You can approximate the music of water into water or water onto rock with the splash or drip of a fountain. Jens Jensen, the landscape architect, supposedly wore out the workmen who were constructing the waterfall in the Garfield Park Conservatory’s fern room, trying to get that sound just right. You can please yourself nearly as much, or drive yourself just as crazy, with your own little pump and some stones.
There are many Zen aspects to creating and maintaining a backyard water feature. For inspiration, you might want to get out and observe nature’s own Zen. Chicago began as something of a marsh and though much (95 percent of Illinois wetlands, according to A Natural History of the Chicago Region ) has been drained, filled in and paved over, there are still numerous preserves in the area. The lily pool, on Fullerton near the Lincoln Park Zoo, reportedly began its existence as a natural pond between two sand dunes. It, as well as other water features throughout Lincoln Park, are places to see some diversity of wetland animals and plants. So are the marshes and ponds of Humboldt and Garfield parks on the West Side. On the South Side, there’s Washington Park and Jackson Park, and further south the Lake Calumet region. There’s a water feature at the North Park Nature Center on the city’s Northwest Side and Long John Slough at the Little Red Schoolhouse in a Willow Springs area forest preserve. Many of these wetlands show healthy signs of recent rehabilitation work by park district or forest preserve authorities. (Because of West Nile Virus, you want to take extra precautions while visiting by wearing protective clothing and repellent.)
The Chicago River is in places an environment almost pond-like. Definitely not a mountain stream and hampered by faint aromas of sewage and detergent, it nonetheless offers food and shelter to numerous waterfowl species, including the green heron, as well as to turtles and fish. Maybe the best way to get in touch with the natural side of the Chicago River is by renting a canoe at Clark Park on the east bank of the Chicago River or Channelside Park in Skokie.
In some respects, Lake Michigan itself is only a pond writ large. After all, the British sometimes refer even to the Atlantic Ocean as “the herring pond” and to “crossing the pond” in order to visit us.
For many people, the lake is mainly a visual feast, dazzling us with reflected light and endless variations on colors of water and sky. But you don’t have to travel too far to find something approaching dune and grass where biodiversity is more abundant than on the sidewalk at North Avenue Beach.
Backyard ponds hold out these other possibilities as well: a huge variety of animals and plants, the possibilities of the murky bottom and the chance to connect with the seasons in a more profound way. Maybe we can even find the time to imagine worldwide connections through the auspices of these bodies of water. (Thoreau spiritually transported himself to India in pondering the path of ice cut from Walden Pond in winter.) We can increase our own sense of balance as we learn to balance the variables of the pond. And even if we can’t verbalize our reasons for returning again and again to these places of water, the important thing is to keep returning.
Jonn Salovaara is a freelance writer who teaches at Columbia College Chicago.
Interested in creating your own backyard retreat? Check out these articles in the May issue
of Conscious Choice: Pond Perfect, How to build a backyard pond
and Backyard Bliss,
How to plant the perfect tree.
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