Vanessa Shannon, Berks
"I’ve always swum and loved swimming but I can’t stand swimming pools, especially in this environment, it’s too agricultural. I think it would be a blot on the landscape. But also the wildlife aspect was important because the whole garden is organic, and I also wanted something that was going to be attractive..."
"Then I saw an article on swimming ponds in The English Garden, and my brother and I were saying we should have one. That must have been about five years ago.
"I looked vaguely into doing it yourself, and thought that was too scary. I spoke to Gartenart and one other company. I generally buy things on an immediacy thing. Tim was very engaging and very personable... I very much bought it because of the people."
"The guys, they were brilliant. Really, really hard workers, I couldn’t believe it, I very very impressed with them. They were out in all weather from 8 until 4pm and they didn’t stop. I would recommend them as workers to anybody, they were fantastic.
"All in all Gartenart were very professional and I was very impressed with the whole set up."
"To be honest I had very high expectations and it has completely met all my expectations. It’s brilliant, I love it.
"It’s really nice even when it has been horrible rain like it has for the past few days, it still catches your eye and it’s still a nice feature. So it’s not just for swimming.
"We had about three swimming parties over the summer, and my son wanted one for his birthday in October but thankfully he was ill so he couldn’t have it then."
"The kids are doing languages and they went on a French and Spanish exchange last year. We had a get together for ten English kids and then the Spanish and French. We did two of them and that was quite fun.
"I even got my 75 year old mum and dad in it - they haven’t swum for about forty years but they dived in."
"I’ve done very little maintenance to it, it’s not needed it.
"We get dragonflies and other wildlife, no ducks because the dogs chase them away. The kids introduce me to new bugs they find.
The adults can’t get how it works, they can’t get that it is actually clean. Especially the men actually - none of them could envisage it beforehand and didn’t quite get it. Having said that since it’s been in everyone has been blown away by it.
"Before if it was a hot sunny day we would have to get the sprinkler out or something, whereas now this is here all the time. And it’s lovely having a feature which is used by everybody."
