Ponds put out welcome mat at the front door

People walking or driving by Doug and Corinne Gibb’s house in Derby have no idea that just across the lawn, inside the short brick walls of the front courtyard, two small ponds gurgle and bubble with life.

Meanwhile, in Kechi, to get to the front door of Terry and Kit Booth’s house, visitors have to ford a pond.

These alternatives to the typical backyard pond are both on the Kansas Pond Society’s pond tour this weekend – along with several backyard ponds and Botanica’s water gardens.

Tickets are $10 for a carload, which gets everybody in the car into eight home gardens, Botanica and, on Saturday, Hong’s and Scenic Landscapes nurseries. The tickets, which include addresses, directions and pond descriptions, are for sale at garden centers and Botanica. Also taking place Saturday is the North Riverside Garden Stroll (see accompanying story).

It’s true that backyard ponds generally offer more privacy, but frontyard ponds have their charms – and are sometimes the only option.

Corinne Gibb had started out with a water garden in her backyard, but it turned into a “disaster,” she said. That’s because there’s a creek in her backyard, too, and creatures of the creek helped themselves to the fish in the man-made water garden. So Gibb moved her efforts to the front yard, placing two small ponds on either side of the sidewalk inside the front wall.

She started out, as many people do, digging her own ponds, and then having an expert – in this case, Scenic Landscapes – come out later to improve on them. Scenic added a waterfall to one of the ponds.

“I like them a lot,” Gibb said of the water features. “A lot of people don’t know they’re in here.”

A similar walk-through pond experience can be had at the Booths’ house in Kechi. But instead of having two separate pools on either side of the walk, one pond runs through a break in the sidewalk. Two stones placed in the water – which is quite shallow at the sidewalk – allow people to ford the stream on their way to the front door. (In the winter, if things get icy, the garage offers a safer alternative.)

The Booths moved to Kechi 10 years ago from Seattle; Terry is from San Diego, and Kit is from Wyoming, so the pond is a way to elevate them somewhat off the Plains.

“I love sitting out here hearing the sound of the river,” Kit Booth said. “I miss the mountains. And he misses the sea.”

Their 5-acre property, which backs up to K-254, also has a wild pond at the back, and tour-goers can hike across the broad backyard to see it. A deck and huge fire pit nestle alongside it, and a bridge crosses the pond.

The Booths also have built a deck off the house that is colorful with decorative panels and window boxes of flowers along the rails. They also have a large vegetable garden in a fenced area of the property.

Corinne Gibb’s small ponds and a couple of containers in her front yard are good examples of how people can have water features without a lot of fuss, said Mike Kandt, president of the pond society.

Gibb made one of the container water features out of a Styrofoam box in which she’d brought fish home from Gupton’s.

“I didn’t have any use for it,” she said of the box, which is about 2 feet square. So she dug a hole about a foot deep so the container would sit flush with the soil, then covered the container with some leftover rubber liner. She then added a small fountain whose cord comes out the top of the container but is camouflaged with rock on its way to a nearby electrical outlet. A rock within the container similarly holds the pump in place and helps cover it up. Because the container is too small for fish, the maintenance is minimal, Gibb said.

However, even her little ponds inside the courtyard, one of which has fish, require some upkeep, and Gibb was working this week to alleviate algae in the water. She had a colorful umbrella propped up over one of her little ponds.

This story was originally published June 15, 2016 at 2:33 PM with the headline "Ponds put out welcome mat at the front door."