My favorite place in my house isn’t actually in my house at all, it’s my back patio. That’s where my husband and I take many of our meals and spend an awful lot of our free time, chillin’ and watching the birds come and go. This well-loved activity is often accompanied by a cocktail of some sort at sunset. Out there I have an assortment of potted plants, a dining table and chairs, and a string of festive party lights that were one of the best presents my mother ever gave me. But the highlight of the space is the little fountain that my husband (rather grandly) calls “the water feature”.
It’s not grand at all, but I am absurdly attached to it. It’s an adapted planter that I plugged with plumber’s putty and then set up with a solar-powered fountain unit. Before I built it I had hunted for months for a fountain that I liked, without success. Too many fountains I saw were cutesy-pie or cheesy looking, or just too plastic. The ones that weren’t cheesy were very expensive, way out of my limited budget. Building my own wasn’t exactly dirt cheap—parts and pot cost me about $200—but I did get to choose exactly the vessel I liked. I fell in love with a two-and-a-half-foot tall earthenware planter from Viet Nam in a deep blue glaze.
After two problem-free years, it suddenly sprang a leak last week. In the course of a single afternoon all the water drained out of it and my fountain pump was sitting dry at the bottom. It turned out that the putty I used as a plug for the drain-hole at the bottom had dried out and become dislodged. So I tipped the pot over on its side and there it sat for about a week until I could fix it. Boy, did I miss it. I didn’t realize how much I’d grown accustomed to the gentle splashing sound and the motion it brought to the patio. Just listening to the sound of that water can make even the hottest afternoon seem cooler, somehow.
Yesterday afternoon I got it patched up and re-filled, and I’m listening to it among the background sounds of my garden right this minute. I highly recommend that even if you garden in the smallest of spaces that you consider getting your own water feature of some kind. It’s soothing, it’s good feng shui, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.
