The practice of making one’s own pond in one’s own yard may not yet have become a movement, but it has a devoted niche audience. Several of the festival’s guests testified to the amount of work it can take to establish and maintain your own personal ecosystem — but they are clearly won over by its rewards.
“We’re situated on a heavily trafficked road,” said Chris Frost, who browsed the rows of water plants for sale Sunday. “So, to have the sound of the water, it adds a white noise. Kind of covers up the traffic. ... It’s therapeutic.”
Frost has been growing his collection of ponds, complete with various plants and fish and hydraulic fountains. He now has three ponds, he said.
“I thought you had four,” his wife, Ann, said to him.
“There are only three,” Frost replied. “Two of those are connected, so they count as one.”
“It can be complex,” Ann said. “We’re not even sure how many ponds we have.”
Green Vista Water Gardens owner Stephen Blessing said he estimated 500 people to have attended his festival Saturday, and that he expected “several hundred” Sunday.
By the end of his shopping expedition, Frost selected a plant called Mare’s Tail, which looks like the ends of new pine branches — if they were sturdy enough to stand up straight for 14 inches. They were sitting out for the festival, but normally Mare’s Tails grow in water, straight up toward the sun.
Frost said he was buying it to give his baby fish a chance to survive by hiding amid its branches. The Japanese fish that his ponds and many water gardens contain are cannibalistic, he explained.
In addition to shopping, the event included auctions, live music, and a seminar where people with aesthetic ponds could describe their problems maintaining a proper ecosystem, and experts tried to diagnose the problems.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0353, or at bsmith@coxohio.com.
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