Catching the Sky

Reflecting on the pond

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CCA’s campus now has nearly all the elements of a fully-fledged classical garden, including hardscaping, asymmetrical structure, vegetables, an orchard, and flowers. But one key element is missing: water. If you walk through any excellent garden, either at a private home or in a public space, you’ll notice that water is nearly always present. Water features have long been beloved by gardeners because they create calm, unify disparate elements, and attract wildlife. But there’s one other advantage to putting water in a garden, which is its tendency to bring down the sky. Still water reflects the sky above it, doubling our sense of space, then delighting us afresh every time a breeze ruffles across, rippling the image, flexing the light, inviting us inward with a thousand shattered movements.

We did not select the site for CCA’s pond, we stumbled across it. Behind an old chainlink fence near our high school entrance was a silted-in mess that housed an encyclopedia of invasive species, from feathergrass to bittersweet to honeysuckle, as if the reject pile from a garden store had been left to root and rot. We dedicated more than an hour one Friday to clearing the space of weeds and muck, but soon realized it would take a lot more work to prepare the site. Over the following weeks, the Classical Roots students and I spent long hours hand-clearing and digging the silt and gravel out of the site to ensure that the bottom was more than twenty-four inches deep. Most of the life in a pond lives near the surface, so shallow areas are fine, but a deeper well regulates the water temperature and helps prevent algae blooms.

At last, after tremendous work, we put the pond liner in and filled the twenty-by-thirty-foot depression with water from a hose; a process that took eight hours. But this wasn’t the end either: the whole surrounding site was still choked with brambles that made access impossible. Luckily, CCA’s annual volunteer day afforded me more than a dozen parents and students who labored all morning and into the afternoon on a recent Saturday, despite pelting rain and temperatures that never rose out of the forties. I was stunned by what they accomplished: backfilling, cutting, clearing, fence removal, the installation of gravel paths. The work is by no means done, but it’s far closer than it would have been on student labor alone.

Most mornings these days, I walk out to the pond before school and imagine how it will look and feel next summer: water lilies speckling the surface, irises and swamp milkweed softening the fringes, the restlessness of robins and the reedy catcalls of red-winged blackbirds. One of the keys to good gardening is to cultivate imagination: to design something, you need to see it before it’s there, before anyone else can. I’m lucky to have so many parents, students, and teachers in my corner, willing to trust me even when I make them dig in the muck, soaked by rain, to make space for something as yet unseen.

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