Minstead · 2022 · Natural swimming pond
The Oak Pond
A chemical-free swimming pond under a three-hundred-year-old oak, filtered by a planted regeneration zone.
The project
- Location
- Minstead, New Forest
- Pond
- 22 × 8 m, swim zone 12 × 5 m
- Filtration
- Planted regeneration zone
- Finish
- Timber jetty, gravel beach
- Heating
- None, sun-warmed
- On site
- 12 weeks
- Finished
- June 2022
The Fairweathers wanted to swim the way they did as children, in clear, living water under the old oak.
A natural pond is two pools in one. Half of it is open water for swimming, and the other half is a shallow bed of reeds, irises and water mint that cleans the water as it is pumped slowly through the gravel.
We set the pond just outside the reach of the oak’s roots and built a timber jetty out over the deep end. The water stays clear without a drop of chlorine, and by the second summer the dragonflies had found it.
How we built it
A pond that cleans itself
Outside the oak’s reach
An arborist mapped the root zone of the three-hundred-year-old oak, and the pond sits wholly outside it.
Plants do the filtering
Over two thousand native plants in the regeneration zone take up the nutrients that would otherwise feed algae.
A slow, quiet pump
One low-energy pump moves the water through the gravel bed so gently that you can only hear it with your ear to the jetty.
In their words
“We were nervous about a natural pond. Now the dragonflies arrive in May and we swim until October.”
The Fairweather familyMinstead · Natural pond, 2022
Begin here
Start with a walk round the garden
A first visit is free and unhurried. We’ll look at the light, the levels and the trees, and tell you honestly what’s possible.