In a sense digging and lining the pond was the easy part, we did not give much though to the problem of edging. There has been a lot of discussion and sketches in our household this week about how to finish it off. Husband took a spade to one edge but was rather dissatisfied with the result. Finally however, with the help of our master textbook on gardening (thank you RHS):

I think we’ve decided on a solution we’re happy with.

It does mean some more digging and another visit to the garden centre for some gravel and pebbles, but hey, this is also an opportunity to buy more plants!

In the photo below you can see the shallow trench the liner is in, with the turtles sloping down to it. The intention is to fill it with larger stones, pebbles and gravel to give a kind of beach effect. We hope to fill this with edging bog plants ultimately too.

The nice thing about spending some time around the pond is the opportunity to it offers to check what wildlife is already inhabiting our wildlife pool. So far I’ve seen a few pond skaters but today I also saw a black diving beetle (probably this one, though I’m far from an expert!) swimming around very happily, which is reassuring. There were a few more pond skaters, which seemed to arrive pretty much with the water and the pond liner itself also had a smooth slimy feel so I expect the algae are starting to colonies as well. No sign of our water lilies yet at the surface though…