Drawn to Water – Enjoying Water Elements Outside and Inside our Homes

By NANNETTE DRAKE OLDENBOURG

Our attraction to water is as essential and multifaceted as water itself. Water is tied to our most basic survival and our most soaring aspirations.

If you’re finding it hard to say goodbye to summer, maybe it’s time to think about incorporating a water element into your yard or inside your home.

Watery additions can be tiny or grand. Of course, the offseason is a good time to get help planning the addition of a large water feature, such as a pond, with the help of local providers and contractors experienced with the necessary materials, pumps, excavation, prepping and stone work.

Smaller features such as birdbaths and small fountains can help us get a healthy water “fix” more quickly, albeit ideally also with design help.

For lower maintenance, and to avoid safety concerns of children having access to a body of water, some outdoor and indoor designs let water run into a collection of stones that hide a pump.

For even less maintenance, a dry riverbed design using river stones and curvilinear lines, or a dry shore design with native grasses can be accented with some blue glass and perhaps marine animal figurines that evoke water. An accompanying or stand-alone drought-friendly plant garden cleverly fulfills the need for green beauty.

Blue stones, blue glass, glass bricks, glass tile, shells, sculptures of sea animals are all stand-ins for water. Collections of blue glass bottles, blue- and green-stained glass and glass stone window art all can help fulfill our unspoken need for water.

Paintings and photographs of water and shorelines do us good as well. Even abstract works with some of the colors suggesting water can evoke the same effect.

The color blue itself is helpful. One need not paint an entire wall blue to benefit. According to Wallace J. Nichols in “Blue Mind,” “In a Japanese study, people were asked to play video games next to a blue partition. They had more regular heartbeat and felt less fatigued and claustrophobic than people who played the same games sitting next to red or yellow partitions.” The full title of Nichols’s book is “Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do.” The author organizes international conferences about the subject.

Nichols claims that blue “is the most often named favorite color beating its closest competing color by a factor of three or four.” He claims that that preference and the fact that shoreline and water-view real estate demands a premium on prices add to the evidence that water has positive effects on us.

Ponds

Hilde Maingay and Earle Barnhart, landscape designers with The Great Work Inc., have enjoyed a koi pond they installed at their home in the in Hatchville, Falmouth, for 15 years. They situated it close at hand so they could enjoy seeing and hearing it when tending to their usual activities at home. The pond is a peaceful oasis in the middle of their busy lives with clients, grandchildren, the New Alchemy cohousing community and other obligations. They certainly can be allowed the indulgence of a pond even during a drought. The pond water is re-circulated and constant, not requiring refilling. Also, unlike most of us, they have stopped flushing fresh water down toilets, opting to use modern (fresh smelling) composting toilets. Even using modern frugal toilets, a typical couple would flush down the 1,000 gallons of water needed for a small koi pond in 50 days.

The design possibilities of water elements are as endless as the ways water can flow or rest. Barnhart and Maingay chose a naturalistic design reflective of their respect for nature. Others choose more angular zen designs. In addition to ponds, people design streams or waterfalls coming down steps adjacent to steps for people, waterfalls falling down hills, water walls sheeting down landscaped walls or smaller fountain walls. Water can fall around a cylinder, or it can form a water wall or curtain to divide open space into separate rooms indoors or “rooms” outdoors. The drama can be expanded through the use of equally versatile lighting that plays with the spray or surface.

It’s possible to add a small feature and to keep it fun.

Patricia Roberge of Onset, Wareham, enjoys three water elements she installed in her garden one by one over decades, plus one she placed inside her house. When she moved into her home 21 years ago, “there wasn’t a dandelion to be had.” Nothing was growing on her lot. After years of loving effort, now her perennial garden evokes abundant paradise. The addition of water elements started when she realized a claw foot bathtub she’d acquired would make the bathroom too crowded. It became the first wet and whimsical addition outside. Her daughter Asia painted a daytime scene on one side of the tub and a nighttime scene on the other. Now hearing mom fill the tub outdoors is a sign of spring in her large family. The next step each year is to add plants.

“There are so many water plants out there (Pondscapes [in Cataumet, Bourne] carries a lot.)” She also visits Soares on Sandwich Road in Falmouth. She loves lotus flowers, but because they are pricey and need to be immersed deep under water level for the winter, she has made another choice. “The common water hyacinth fills the bill. It forms a mat and spreads out completely, covering the space it is bound to. So at three plants for $10, I get more bang out of my buck. It forms a lovely blue, violet-colored flower which is very lovely, albeit short lived.” Roberge noted that water hyacinth can be invasive if not kept in check. She keeps mosquitoes from them by using “mosquito donuts” containing specific bacteria that is toxic only to mosquitoes. Mosquito larvae eat bits of the discs and do not mature into flying biters, whereas other creatures are not harmed by contact with the material. The “dunks” need to be replaced once a month.

Fountains

Next, Roberge wanted to add movement and sound. She visited the PondScapes and the Stove and Fireplace Center on Route 28A in Cataumet and chose a small bamboo fountain to enliven another garden focal point. She positioned the fountain close enough to the house so that when she and others in her family are in their bedrooms they can enjoy hearing the water trickle outside. Since the water is re-circulated, little is wasted.

At the end of the warm season, Roberge can still enjoy flowing water. She placed a small fountain inside, choosing a spot in a centrally located stair landing where she can enjoy it frequently. “We slow down when we go by it,” she said.

Small fountains can be used outside in the summer and indoors in the winter, while others can stay inside year round, echoing the call of the water outside. Fountain types include those with spouts and those that cascade.

Within European tradition, fountains were originally served by aqueducts built to bring water from mountains and springs. They operated by gravity. The fountains served villages and towns, and people ran into their neighbors when collecting water.

Their metal spouts, sometimes leading water out of a lion’s mouth or other motif, earn one type of fountain the name of spouting.  

In cities, royalty arranged for more elaborate fountains with spouting and cascading water flowing over or out of statuary.

Some designs for homes call upon the original fountains with a spout at the edge of the walled hillside and a basin below it.

Cascading designs include those made to look like stony brooks, others with jugs or other containers. Another classic design is of two or three basins, a small one at the top and progressively larger basins below, allowing water to cascade from the top basin over the edge to the lower basin and so on.

Small fountain designs are often the motif of vessels used to collect water. Others depict natural settings of water cascading over rocks.

Early fountains were fed by gravity, and there was no stopping the water. Later designs incorporated pumps and re-circulated water. Pumps and lights have greatly expanded the possibilities.

Some aspects remain the same. The pond or basin requires maintenance, at least removal of debris now and then.

Birdbaths

Noticing how birds were attracted to the water, Roberge added two bird baths, one in the front yard and one in the backyard.

Having learned the hard way that water spigots can get damaged after frost, Roberge carefully drains and closes her outdoor faucet, so she is not able to keep bird baths in the winter. (See more about birdbaths, fountains and ponds below.)

Birdbaths provide delights for both birds and the people who watch them. Locating a bath near a feeder will help birds find it. In the summer, a shady spot out of reach of local cats will be most successful. Some birds swallow by tipping their heads back, and others suck up water while immersing their bills. Still others, such as warblers, get their moisture elsewhere but do like to bathe in water.

Adding a small fountain, mister or dripper to move the water will help advertise the water’s presence to attract birds and will keep mosquitoes from breeding.

When there’s snow, they can eat snow and get moisture that way, but it requires them to use precious calories to heat their bodies to do so. Free-flowing water is very helpful.

In the winter plastic containers are less likely to crack than other materials, and they are less likely to be expensive to replace if they do crack. Heaters, or “de-icers” and basins are sold separately at the lower price range. Pedestel birdbaths with incorporated heaters are on the higher end. Thermostats save money. The first solar-powered heaters and water movers have mixed reviews. Experts recommend textured basins for the winter, and any birdbath should have a rim where birds can stand. 

Why Do We Love Water So Much?

For millennia, water’s presence decided for us where we could make camp or settle a home, and where we could travel. Like our nomadic ancestors, we can look at a pond or stream and get the sense that we need look no farther. We can put down our burdens of the day or week and rest in its presence, drinking and eating from it in more ways than one.

Yet we are drawn to water for many reasons beyond necessity.

Might we love water because it reminds us of ourselves? It serves as a metaphor for ourselves and all the things we can do—or would like to do—in the world.

Water can be still and deep or still and shallow, but it can also babble and gush, meander and shoot. It can fall long distances without peril or injury, only to land and glide, ready to bubble, spray, weave, or trickle. It can flow constantly or in spurts…and, most miraculously, when hit with cold air, it transforms completely, claiming more space for itself in one last move, bursting into lasting shapes, and turning white.

On its surface, water reflects the heavens and sometimes gives us a kind of heaven on earth…though storms can bring the opposite. Under its surface lies another world to discover, offering as much mystery as any life and requiring us to nearly fly. On its edges, water again reminds us of ourselves. It teases, coming and going with varying heights of swipes. We can play with it, but we can never break it. Perhaps we would like to be as timeless and as limitless as water.

On the one hand, our encounters with water are private. We feel it with our skin, mostly out of view. Yet we share bodies of water with humans and creatures of all kinds, everyone touching that same body of water now, and before and after us.

And all the while the ocean sounds as though it is breathing.

In his book, “Blue Mind,” Wallace J. Nichols writes that we stare at water because its reflections and movement offer the right mixture of variety and constancy: “Our eyes are drawn to the combination of novelty and repetition, the necessary criteria for the restfulness of “involuntary attention.” “

Nichols explains that restful involuntary attention we experience watching water or in nature generally contrasts with the much more tiring focused attention we use when working or taking care of others and ourselves in cities, making constant decisions and looking out for danger. “Water becomes something that people can watch for hours and never be bored.” 

In other words, looking at water is a kind of meditation that does us good.

I suspect another reason we are fascinated with water is that, depending on the weather and the climate, water can be soothing or dangerous. Though the frequency of large storms and flooding is increasing on the global scale, water is still mostly a positive in our lives, serving us well as long as it can.