Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Garden water feature No.2: bubbling fountain

My husband, John, found the black boulder that he used for this fountain at a local quarry. At first he thought it was granite, but it turns out to be slate.

Basically, he just did a bit of carving to level the top so the water would come out evenly and he polished the surface to a nice shine. Most important, he had a hole for the bubbling water bored down the length of the rock by a guy who has the right tools. (This fellow makes garden lighting for the landscape trade out of carved granite stones that he imports from China, and he has drill press machines that do the job.)

The stone is set on top of a large plastic basin that serves as a water reservior and holds a submersible pump. It's covered with screen and fine pea gravel. It looks simple, but John had a few setbacks. His first plastic basin was too small, and the pump he's bought wasn't powerful enough either. Once those problems were solved, the bubbling fountain worked beautifully. As anyone who has done these kinds of projects knows, putting a fountain like this together is never as easy as the magazine articles make it look.

2 comments:

  1. I wish we could listen to your bubbler. It is certainly beautiful! I love that you were able to get a large hunk of slate. It certainly gives a lot of color to your little area there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:11 PM

    Love your containers...gotta tell you about a deal: clearance sale had some square granite looking 'bathroom' accessories'(possiblly tall kleenex box covers?),reg price $40.00; I got 3 @ $3.00 each, turn the upside down an ta da! beautiful pots...with drainage!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks so much for visiting this site. I have a new country garden blog and I will no longer be publishing comments at this blog. If you have a question or comment about the topic here, please use the contact form at my new blog to get in touch with me.

-Yvonne, aka Country Gardener