The Savage Water Garden - What is It and Why Should I Consider Building One?

• Artist: Eric Triplet - AKA The Pond Digger
• Title: The Savage Water Garden - What is It and Why Should I Consider Building One?
• Genre: Water Garden / BOG Garden
• Year: 2008
• Length: 17:57 minutes (16.44 MB)
• Format: Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

The victim, an unsuspecting Diptera, has no idea what is about to do him in. He’s flying about on this beautiful day, and life is just peachy. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, fragrant flowers and their sweet scents abound, and the wonderful sound of waterfall is all around. This Musca genus member is nearly hypnotized by the intoxicating floral fluid of a bladelike, lime green plant we Homo sapiens refer to as the Venus flytrap (Dionaea musicpula). As the unsuspecting insect zooms in closer, this flesh eating plant’s trigger hairs are activated, which causes its clawed deathtrap leaves to snap shut with amazing speed to create a carnivorous coffin for the plant’s partial namesake -- the fly. A gland within the carnivore’s leaves digest the insect’s soft tissues; then it is literally ready to consume another unlucky customer.

Cultivating a ‘Savage Water Garden’ ecosystem is an extremely rewarding pond project, which will obviously deliver much fun! This is not your conventional water garden…its savage -- thanks to carnivorous plants that gain their nutrition from insects captured by the plants themselves. These carnivorous or insectivorous plants include, along with the Venus flytrap, the Hooded pitcher plant (Sarracenia minor), Sweet pitcher (Sarracenia rubra), and Water sundews (Drosera intermedia).

The seeds to nurture a Savage Water Garden were planted, so to write, when I was a boy. Having a flytrap plant shut on your youthful finger was in the same cool category as experiencing Star Wars for the first time on the big screen! Here is where I begin to show my age! As a youth, I killed way too many Venus fly traps to recall, but probably no more than most of you. When we two-leggeds perpetrated “planticide,” I justified it as survival of the fittest.

Someone, some how and in some way has managed to keep the Venus flytrap cultivated all these years to entice the public to revisit their childhoods by purchasing the insectivorous plant at super stores, garden centers and even the Wild Animal Park in San Diego. I still have enough kid in me to reacquaint myself with the tiny carnivores.

My fascination with the hungry Venus flytrap, which is native to North and South Carolina, moved me enough to buy a variety of carnivorous plants a several years ago. After just a little research, I learned their specific light, growing media and water requirements. Water needs are key to their success. You see, here in Southern California the water comes out of the tap at 8.0ph or above, which is lethal to this interesting plant.

These plants have survived in nutrient-deprived water and nitrogen-deprived soil in bogs by evolving as carnivores to derive nitrogen from insects. To keep your Venus flytrap and other carnivorous plants alive, it is imperative that you water them with distilled water, rainwater or reverse osmosis water, unless you have a neutral ph in your water. The latter is the purest of water that has been stripped of all nutrients and filtered through fine membranes and carbon filters.

Even though previously I would give my carnivorous plants the proper sunlight and mandatory nutrient-poor water when I watered them, I still would end up killing them because I would get busy and forget to water them as needed! I reflected on this from the perspective of my years of experience in constructing water gardens and knowing aquatic plants. Because most of these carnivorous plants live in swampy bogs, it dawned on me, why not showcase them in a water garden or pond – it’s what I do.

Thus was born the Savage Water Garden, which my wife, kids and I enjoy viewing first thing each morning from the safety of our kitchen window. Then we don our flip flops and venture forth for an up-close interaction.

BYOB: Build Your Own Bog

The Exotic Aquatics’ crew members – known as The Pond Diggers® -- used a back flushable biological waterfall filter and a mechanical skimmer as the heart and soul of the ponds eco-system.

Next, I traveled to a local rock yard to hand select several tons of beautiful specimen accent boulders, and then headed off to the equipment yard to secure the necessary heavy machinery to install the boulders.

After the pond’s shape was formed, we installed the filtration and plumbing. Now the savage step arrived. For a regular pond, we would have installed a 15-by-25-foot liner; for the Savage Water Garden, we chose a 20-by-25-foot liner to provide extra liner outside the pond in which to create boggy areas for the carnivorous plants.

After the pond was lined with rocks and gravel, and filled with water, and the heavy equipment was gone, we carved out the bog areas on the pond’s outer perimeter. These plant pockets were excavated only two inches below water level.

I chose sphagnum moss as the plant media in which the carnivorous plants would not only survive in, but thrive in! I knew the sphagnum moss would soak up the water like a sponge to keep the plants’ roots perfectly moist.

My young son Taylor and I filled the planting pockets with four inches of the sphagnum moss. From an aerial view, the bog areas look like land.

The trick now was to moisten this moss in the planting pockets with reverse osmosis water! It turned out that the reverse osmosis unit I ordered was not going to be able to arrive prior to Exotic Aquatics’ “Pond Tour for the Cure™” charity event, and the Savage Water Garden was set to debut on the tour.

Therefore, I visited the local aquarium retail establishment, Daryl’s Pet Shop to truck home 140 five-gallon jugs of the reverse osmosis water, which the shop carries for salt water aquariums. The water-filling task and planting commenced.

My wife and kids had fun planting the carnivores with me. Please note that no human was harmed in the process of creating the Savage Water Garden, planting the carnivores, nor viewing the feature on the recent pond tour.

I am just grateful the bog planting pockets work around-the-sun dial (or clock for non-gardeners) on their own to keep the plants sufficiently watered and in predator mode.

By Eric Triplet – AKA The Pond Digger

Eric Triplett, The Pond Digger™ owns the Redlands-based Exotic Aquatics Pond Education and Supply Warehouse and The Pond Digger, Waterscape and Design Construction Company. He specializes in building low maintenance, ecologically balanced waterscapes for fish and aquatic plants but more importantly, for people.