Making it took a few weeks of digging last summer. I started by marking out the shape, it doesn't show in the photo but the ground slopes down quite a bit so it took a while to find a curve that fitted:
It's about half a metre at the deepest point. At the downhill end I dug a separate pit for a bog garden, so that when the water overflows it falls into the bog:
I bought the plastic lining online. In the bog side I put some off-cuts and cut some holes in the lining so that some of the water drains away. Then I filled the the pond side with water and the bog with soil:
I left a rather big "shelf" that I want to fill in with more marginal plants this year. At the moment there are some if my favourite: marsh marigold, creeping jenny, yellow flag and a native lilly.
The bog area is already full with a hosta, a couple of astilbes and a meadowsweet. I put in some fritillary bulbs, hopefully they'll come up this spring!
The last thing I built was the drier top bit. Several trips to the garden centre to buy rocks and gravel, and I finally planted my grasses there. I don't have a lot of space elsewhere for grasses, and this bit in the middle is quite sunny so I've decided to group them all together. It's mostly grasses of different leaf colours, verbena bonariensis, crocosmia and a red hot poker - like my mini version of a prairie-style garden.
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