6 August 2025

The wisdom of pond life

A small tub of water has radically enlarged my sense of what the world could be.

Photo by Anthony Hatley/Millennium Images, UK

One summer’s day in the late 1970s my father picked up a spade and started digging a pond. I remember his rolled shirtsleeves, the thud and snap of severing roots, the piling up of sandy soil. Fuelled by cups of tea and pints of barley water, he excavated a wide, terraced, irregularly shaped hole. Once he’d added a black plastic liner, anchoring its edges with bricks and rocks, he turned on the garden hose. It took forever to fill the hole with water, but eventually it was gone, replaced by a flat surface that reflected, darkly, the sky.

This new pond was absent of life, though its surface trembled with drowning flies, beetles and solitary wasps. I rescued them whenever I could, though I could only reach those closest to the edge. Then the pond skaters appeared, wolfish insects that seemed constructed of folded carbon paper and thin, high-tension wire. Beneath their slim, dark backs were wings I never saw, and they drank the juices of drowning insects through a proboscis like a straw. I learned very quickly that the pond involved a lot of nature red in tooth and claw, but seeing it wasn’t a difficulty. Like things on television, or the abstract musings of academic economists, the medium was sufficiently distanced from my own life that I could watch death and decay and feel only fascination.

We planted the pond with buckets of plants stolen from the Aldershot canal. Reed mace, yellow flag, marsh marigold, handfuls of water milfoil. With the addition of plants, the pond became something else: a new place to go. In his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here, M John Harrison recalls that as a child he stared in bemusement at a pond because there seemed to be more clarity in the water than in air. Summer air is often hazy with dust and pollen, but that is not what I think he meant. The clarity he describes is exactly what drew me to that childhood pond. Not in its earliest days, when algae turned the water green, but later, when the pond developed a clarity that was crystalline and more than simply optical. It was a clearness about the nature of things that came from staring into a world that was incredibly close but entirely inaccessible.

The pond radically enlarged my sense of what life could be. The creatures in there were magnificently strange. There were planarian flatworms – animate, tiny tongues with googly eyes. There were budding florets of hydras, colonies of hydrozoans resembling tiny sea anenomes. There were water measurers, backswimmers, herds of daphnia, armoured dragonfly nymphs, newts, frogs, sometimes a grass snake with scaled sides coiled and slack in the shallows. I was a child very prone to dissociation, and I’d lie on my stomach for what felt like hours, staring into the water. I adored the shift in scale it provoked, a shrinking into smallness whenever I let my mind fall below the pond’s surface. All my scratching childhood worries vanished when a smooth newt became something the size of a bus, a heron’s passage overhead a mountain-sized shadow.

That child is long gone, and so is the pond. But earlier this summer I dragged a large wooden tub across the garden to rest outside my kitchen, filled it with water, then added a miniature water lily and a handful of pondweed. I wasn’t trying to make a pond, but trying to save myself from work. I’ve been travelling a lot and it’s been hard to keep my garden birdbath always clean and filled.

The tub has worked spectacularly as an avian oasis. Birds flock to it. Sparrows, great tits, blue tits and dunnocks use the lily leaves as bathing platforms. Woodpigeons teeter on the tub’s rim to dip their beaks. Pheasants and partridges started making the trek from the fields behind the house to drink. Jackdaws, thrushes, starlings, greenfinches, goldfinches, whole families of long-tailed tits all come to the tub for water. I can sit typing at my kitchen desk and see in ten minutes more species than I would on a morning’s walk in the village.

But the tub has become more than a watering hole. I’d forgotten the generative magic of standing water. For a while it flushed green, twitching with mosquito larvae, then cleared. Full-stop-sized spheres appeared, singly, then in their hundreds – seed shrimps, multiplying into swarms. Water slaters, underwater relatives of woodlice that must have arrived with the pondweed, crawl lugubriously about. Long tracks are carved in the green algae of the pot’s interior by the rasping tongue of a water snail.

Like anyone in possession of a heart who has been keeping up with world news, I’ve been grieving. What I’ve managed in terms of activism has felt pointless. Even the smallest joys have come to feel like transgressions. At my most despairing, I’ve sat and stared into the tiny pond simply to lose myself for a while in the lives it contains. But doing so has shown me that sometimes escapism is not simply a flight, but a way of recharging one’s ability to work. It’s reminded me that joy is not only permissible, but something whose occlusion is welcome to those who would snuff out any joys other than their own. I baulk at using nature as an obvious metaphor, and I am not prone to preach, but even so: let us make ponds, real and metaphorical. Let us supply the substrate for lives unlike our own. Let us marvel at otherness. Let us make a place for others to take sustenance. And let us not scorn the smallest occasions for love, when the skies are arid and tight with lack of rain.

Helen Macdonald’s “Vesper Flights” is published by Jonathan Cape