MICHAEL VINEY ANOTHER LIFEBut for the jelly-moulds of frogspawn shivering at the surface, our garden pond is now virtually invisible: one false step and you'd be up to your knees. Beneath the mattress of twining meadow-grass and spiky rushes, a jungle of stems crowds the water - still seething, no doubt, with small aquatic animals stalking each other through the dark.
All this dates from my attempts to "furnish" the newly made pond a dozen years ago: anything to take the bare look off a bottom of black plastic. A few shovelfuls of soil, a few buckets of plants and roots from the lake with their attendant eggs and larvae, a few dollops of spawn from a pool up the hill and the trick was done: sit back and wait for an ecosystem! When the fog of green algae had cleared, the assembled pond soon came, indeed, to enchant our springs. Perhaps 100 frogs gleaming and churring in the water, their orgies piling it with spawn. A steeper sun discovered great water beetles gliding after tadpoles or the courtship ballet of gilded newts. At the surface, the scribbling of whirligig beetles, the dimpling of featherweight pond skaters, a first damselfly unfolding crimson tinsel. Collins' Field Guide to Freshwater Life had me peering after sprites and goblins; a microscope would have captured me for ever.
The plants unfolded with enthusiasm, jostling for sun. A yellow water-lily stolen from a marsh eventually gave up its struggle for space as pondweeds, bogbean and water mint crowded together at the surface, and grasses and mosses crept in from the edge. The bogbean is still a delight in May and June, holding up pink-and-white flowers like fringed, orchidaceous hyacinths. They decorate, for a while, a pond that wants so much to be a fen, if not, in some long, mossy future, a little bump of bog.
I did fight this for a few years, laying into it each autumn with an ancient, long-handled, iron claw (the original muckrake) to drag out heaps of vegetation (duly left to drain so that accompanying creatures could hop, skip or slither back in). All I wanted was a little open water, some lively glitter and ripples, a bright mirror on dull days. But the effort finally was too much hard work, and natural succession has been left to take its course. The frogs have dwindled in number; the newts are no longer on show.
So that's one sort of result in faking nature - but native nature, as it were, and doing, in the end, small harm. Most garden ponds, however, are made in suburbs remote from wild marshes and lakes. This may be just as well, but it has set up a brisk garden-centre trade in decorative water plants, many imported from abroad. Aquarium hobbyists, too, seek to make their fish at home among suitably feathery, oxygenating fronds. In consequence, some aquatic plants now figure among the worst of Ireland's invasive species.
Don't ask me how they escape from ponds and aquariums, but they do: thrown out in the wrong place, whirled in the wind, flushed down the loo. Water plants spread mainly vegetatively - from fragments of themselves - and their urge is to go on spreading as far as space and conditions allow.
The spiralling fronds of curly waterweed (Lagarosiphon major) from southern Africa, positively bubble with oxygen. First found in Lough Corrib in 2005, it now notoriously covers 10 hectares of Rinneroon Bay, near Oughterard, its dense stands filling the water to a depth of several metres, clogging engines, strangling divers and threatening the ecology of Ireland's premier trout angling lake. There's a task force bent on finding ways to control it.
Parrot's feather (Myriophyllum aquaticum) looks like one of those beautiful tall mosses in the ditches of conifer plantations, but grows as dense floating mattresses that can, in official disapprobation, "impair recreational exploitation of infested waters". It is widely grown in garden ponds and has been spotted at five new wild sites in the Republic since 2000.
With the common name of fairy moss, but actually a floating aquatic fern, Azolla filiculoides, is a free-floating plant with lovely pink edges to flat, lacy leaves (press them under water and they bob straight up again). I can quite see why anyone should want it in their pond, but it can spread forever on calm water and pile up in dense, rotting rafts. Coming from the warmer parts of America, and already in Ireland, it is one of those undesirable aliens that climate change could turn into a eutrophicating menace.
Visit www.invasivespeciesireland.com and you can find your way to more "most unwelcome" water plants, either here already or just waiting to arrive. You are begged, by relevant agencies north and south, not to buy invasive aquatic plants and to dispose of garden waste "in a responsible manner". That goes for aquariums, too.