Recently, I was contacted by a client for whom I had installed a water garden some 4 or 5 years ago. Her husband had been the pond tender and since he had passed about 1 year ago, she was getting a bit overwhelmed with pond maintenance. She loved the pond, but just couldn't keep up with it. So we decided to convert the pond to a disappearing fountain as she still wanted a water feature, just without the maintenance of a pond. Here is a picture of the original pond.

The first step was to disassemble the pond. This involved quite a bit of sweat equity, removing plants, rocks, gravel, etc. It was around 98 degrees during the whole project so the water cooler was one thing we made sure to keep stocked with ice and fresh water. Staying well hydrated is crucial when doing labor in high temps. Here's what it looked like after being disassembled.

The soil on this site was deep sand, quite shifty. We were building a fountain using 3 large ceramic pots imported from Asia. These pots were quite heavy and too large for the 4x4 fountain basins that we normally use for these installations so we had to custom build a basin that would be large enough for the pottery and also would maintain level and support the weight of the pots. We started by pouring a 4" thick concrete slab.

After allowing the slab to cure overnight, we built the walls for the basin out of 8x8x16 concrete blocks. We capped the blocks with 2" concrete soaps giving the basin a final depth of about 18 inches. The dimensions for the basin was 6'x6' square. We used construction adhesive to cement the blocks together and lined the basin with 44 mil EPDM pond liner.

The next photo shows the basin and liner. The blocks standing on edge were simply used to hold down the liner after we glued the liner to the top edge of the basin. You can also see the heavy plastic grating supported by concrete blocks. This would support the pottery and gravel. The pottery was supported by additional concrete blocks under each pot.

Below are some photos of the completed job. We built this fountain with a 3 man crew including myself. It took 2 and a half days to complete. The fun and challenging part of this installation was designing the basin, using the existing rock that we got out of the pond, and creating a beautiful and low-maintenance water feature for our client. All she has to do as far as maintenance goes is to occasionally add water that gets lost to evaporation. For more info on disappearing fountains, you can contact me at Bloomers Garden Center, 512-281-2020.