Note
Most natural pool conversions come with a question of where to put the wetland. At Pollard, perched on the steps of St James, there was almost nowhere to put it.

The pool was already in place and the space around it was tiny. There was no spare corner of garden to hand over to a gravel bed, no room to build outward, and no option to move the pool. On a job like this the honest answer is often that a conversion is not possible. We did not want to give that answer.

Working with the space that existed

Instead of looking for one large area, we used every centimetre already around the pool. The wetland was built as a narrow gravel bed wrapping around the pool itself, following its edge rather than sitting apart from it. It reads as a planted border, which is exactly what a tight site needs, but it is doing real biological work: water is fed through the gravel, moving evenly through the bed rather than skimming over the surface, and returning to the pool clean.

Going vertical: the wet wall

The second move was to stop thinking horizontally. Where there was no floor area left, there was wall. We built a waterproof stone wall alongside the pool and turned it into part of the system. Water is delivered to the top and allowed to trickle down the face of the stone, and that face is planted out with ferns and aquatic species that want exactly those conditions, constant moisture and constant movement.

The wall does three jobs at once. It is a feature, and a beautiful one. It provides growing conditions for plants that would not otherwise have a home on this site. And as water films its way down the stone and through those roots, it is being aerated and biologically treated before it circulates back into the pool, adding to the overall filtration rather than just looking the part.

Pollard is the pool we point to when someone says their space is too small to convert. Very often it is not. It just needs to be read differently.