(ANGUS) I'm keen for you to meet Michael Gillings, a passionate professor of biology
at Macquarie University who has turned an old fiberglass pool
into a fantastic aquatic garden.
(MICHAEL) It's really nice to come home to an oasis of organisms.
The plants, the frogs, the fish, the lizards... you never know what you're gonna see.
(ANGUS) So really what it's done is created a whole new habitat for you to study?
Yes it has, I am fascinated to come out here every day and find something new
Why did you decide to turn your pool in to a pond?
Having this pool in the backyard was a white elephant and I really didn't want to maintain it and pay the
electricity and fill it full of chemicals so I just thought
'well why don't I just let it go natural?' I turned the pump off and then you get a
bloom of algae. It turns green like an unmaintained swimming pool does and then
over about two or three months you start to get aquatic invertebrates colonizing the pool.
Once that happens there's food for fish and the water quality is good
so you can start adding in plants and fish.
So don't go shock horror if the water turns green...
Oh you've gotta be prepared for greenness when you start!
If you've got a saltwater pool
the process is a bit longer. You'll need
permission from the water board to drain the water and remove the salt and
remember it's still a swimming pool just a different kind.
Anything that council required when you first put in the pool, you still need - like fences and gates.
Tell me about your little babbling brook here.
Well one of the problems with the pond
is that you get what's called an 'oxycline', the bottom part of the pond
has no oxygen in it and that's really not very good for fish so we put this in
it's a small pond pump that feeds through a set of pipes and this
oxygenates the pool and moves the water around but also provides a haven for
small aquatic invertebrates and tadpoles.
So you'd recommend putting it in right at the start for people?
I would I'd recommend at least one small pond pump
just to keep the water moving and to aerate it.
And you've got a lovely pot of nardoo I noticed?
Nardoo, yes!
So that's just growing in a pot?
That's growing in a floating pot
so it's got a ring of polystyrene around it then it just floats around the pool
So you've used plants really effectively along the edge of the pond
how did you make it happen?
Well we lined the inside of the pond
with shape cloth and put logs and rocks down but then to put plants around the
edge we used metal hanging baskets which are suspended off the side of the pool
and so that that allows you to put plants all along the side of the pool..
Like this...
Mmm... that dark-leaf Colocasia... very clever I love your strategy there.
As a biologist Michael is interested in all living creatures
When you bring moss into the garden all sorts of things
start to appear out of the moss like these tiny little ferns here every
single moss is different. The diversity that's here is just amazing and I like
the fact that they're underappreciated
So how do you do it how do you get the mosses growing?
So, mosses can be collected from anywhere.
They're in every ditch beside every road.
But one of the tips that I've found, is that if you use
brickies sand and you put the moss on top of that,
that helps with the transplanting.
So the brickies sand has a little bit of extra clay in it to retain the moisture?
I guess so, yeah. Of course mosses will also grow up their own
accord in your in your pond as well.
So Angus here's something you really need to keep out of your pond.
If you go down to the creek people are tempted to catch
fish and introduce them to their pond but almost certainly you'll catch these guys
gambusia - and they're the cane toad of fresh water.
So they're an exotic fish that's been brought in?
They're an exotic fish and they eat all native fish eggs, they eat all the invertebrates.
So anytime I get a plant I always stick it in a bucket of water
for a while to quarantine it make sure there's no
gambusia before I put them in the pond.
What sort of native fish alternatives are there?
We have two species here
the crimson spotted rainbow fish and a species of gudgeon and what they do in
the pond is eat the insect larvae in particular they eat mosquito larvae
So you think this could be an archetypal Australian garden style?
I would hope so! There's so many unused
swimming pools and they can all be turned into this kind of garden.
Even in this tiny garden Michael's love of the natural world shines through.
A place to watch the world go by.
We tend to forget that we're part of that natural world
we set ourselves apart from it.
Doing something like this,
gardening in general and the pond in particular because it involves
animals as well as plants
puts us firmly back in that natural world