Show #23/7210. A Garden That - Enhances Nature's Beauty

A Very Different Water Feature

Just off the main residence is a wonderful array of water features that Mauree and Hank must love listening to when having dinner out on the back patio. This weeping wall is a very unique structure. We don't see many of these in the many, many gardens that we tour. And it's just such an amazing departure from the conventional water feature. Hank, since this is a bit of a feat of engineering we'll to turn this over to you. Hank confirms, there's a little bit of a story here. There was a feature adjacent to this, but it’s all one feature now, they had that feature put in originally when they bought the house. As you can tell this home and property are at the base of a series of mountains. So there is a lot of excess excess water runoff from these mountains. And water has a desire to go downhill, always. All we can do is try to channel it where we want it to go. When they bought this house, the area behind, that now has a pergola and it looks like it's always been there was basically a two-car garage. And this wall was not here. The driveway came down and went into this two-car garage. And 20 feet down we had two drain pipes that actually flowed from the street all the way into the pond. And over the 50 years that this home had been here, those drain pipes eroded away. They didn't realize that they had eroded, because they're buried 20 feet deep. Unfortunately, they had a collapse of this water feature. Half of it dropped four feet, so had to fix that. So called Tim and Bob Dews, but in order to fix it, they needed to dig it up, figure out exactly what went wrong. And they did that. And they came back and said, "Well, the pipes are gone, the bottom's rusted out of both pipes. And by the way, you've got five springs that intersect each other right under this water feature." They decided instead of just putting in more pipe and spending a ton of money to create a drainage system that nobody could see, let's make it beautiful. So they used that opportunity to build a retaining wall, to flatten out the driveway that was there and just told Bob and Tim, "Just make it into something gorgeous.” So they decided they were going to do a weeping wall. And what is a weeping wall? It's a retaining wall with stack stone. And buried in this wall are three horizontal PVC pipes that about every 12 inches they drilled holes in. And they hooked them all into the water system they have, the circulating system here, hence the weep.
The other thing that's really cool is they designed this so that one part of the existing water feature flows underneath this section of stones, circulates all the way around, all the way underneath these stones. And the force of the water coming out of the weeping wall pushes that circulation back out and it goes out underneath this stone. It flows back into the water feature. So you have a constant flow of circulation. The water stays nice and clean and clear. I's just, it's awesome.