Bog or Pond? Similarities with Stanley Park

The Vancouver Sun newspaper's cover story byline today was:

A report to be released Monday says pollution, invasive species and climate change are harming the aquatic environment of Vancouver's largest park. It calls for urgent action to address problems.

Hmm. I bought the paper.

When I'm not revelling in the beauty of the grotto (see previous post) in Roswitha's garden, I'm wondering how the heck to "fix" the pond.



Notice how brown the water is in the photo. I'd just finished wading around, weeding grass and invasive species out of the islands of water lilies. The water lilies themselves have become invasive. They are growing in islands of primordial muck--it reaches the surface in the centre of the clumps. Who knew. When you first "plant" water lilies, you anchor their roots in a weighted mesh-type pot in the bottom of your pond, and delight when a few waxy blooms quake open on the surface, so fragile...

If you think I'm wading around in my knickers, you're wrong. I'm fully hip-wadered, after new life forms emerged last year...ick. Up until last year, I happily rolled up the pantlegs, and drifted about with the pond skimmer, like one of those dryads in a Waterhouse painting (ya, right). It was refreshing. Then one day, I emerged...with little brown leeches all over my legs.

This was a new development. Other new developments were:

• a never-ending flush of green string-algae (rather than just one mid-summer algae bloom)
• the remarkable increase in size of the fresh-water crustaceans skittering around the bottom

Ick. Double Ick.

Being a Sherlock type, I figured the pond balance was askew. The ratio of water-to-muck was turning the pond into something resembling a...bog. Three factors came to mind:

• the water lily muck-islands
• the accumulated bottom debris
• the nitrogen-rich soluble fertilizer run-off from the flower benches above the pond

So I absconded the said hip waders and attempted a bottom clearing of the pond, scooping out heaps of blackened organic debris with a re-purposed leaf rake. It became clear (my conclusions, not the pond water) that scooping bottom debris was not going to solve the problem.

Somehow, the water lilies have to be wrestled out of the pond. Water lily wrestling--now that will destroy all romanticized views of floating lotuses.

Back to Stanley Park. Sometime last summer, the park ponds experienced a bizarre and unexplained bright turquoise algae bloom. Studies ensued. According to today's article:

...pollution and invasive species--such as the water lilies that are choking Beaver Lake--are major contributors to the aquatic ecosystems' demise...Beaver Lake shrank to 3.9 hectares in 1997 from 6.7 hectares in 1938 because of sedimentation, increased plant growth and a depletion of oxygen in the water...[According to Patricia Thompson, executive director of the Stanley Park Ecological Society,] the report highlights the need to protect the lake, which is on course to becoming a bog.

Elsewhere in the article, local ducks are also accused of compounding the problem with their duck-doo.

Hmm. (Roswitha just emailed me to announce her resident duck-pair have quackily arrived.)

So the factors are clear, if nothing else. Nevertheless, I take exception to the phrase "protect the lake from becoming a bog."

I understand that a backyard swamp-garden lacks some aesthetic and olfactory appeal. But aren't we missing something? Don't pools naturally fill in over time, due to accumulating sedimentation and accelerated plant growth, thus becoming bogs...peat moss...and, in twenty thousand years or so (no idea)...oil? It's pre-history in the making folks.