Building Water Features: Avoid Concrete

Dec 10 2009 Published by under Install and Maintain, Water Garden Features

Natural waterfall (photo: flickr-corrieb)

Natural waterfall (photo: flickr-corrieb)

You might think that concrete and mortar would be logical materials for building water features. After all, concrete is solid and waterproof, so it should hold water, right? Actually, I’m not very keen on using concrete when it comes to building a water feature.

My main objection to concrete water features is that they never really resemble what you would find in nature. Even if you build a stone wall that is mortared together with cement, and then have water running over it, it still doesn’t look natural.

Concrete is difficult to hide behind stone, and it concrete expands and contracts quite a bit, particularly in areas where the temperature fluctuates a lot. For this reason alone I find concrete to be unreliable.

If your aim is to create something which looks natural, then you should essentially try to use mostly natural stone materials. Not only will it look great, it is relatively easy to build your own waterfall using natural stone.

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