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Our ponds are where it’s at
Find out what you can see at our ponds and how they support life in our gardens.
Our ponds are nestled in our new gardens among the busy roads and pavements of South Kensington. For many of the creatures that live in or pass through our gardens, the water and banks of the ponds provide vital food and shelter.
Our ponds not only support wildlife throughout the year, they also attract more and more creatures to come and live in our gardens as time goes on. By connecting to the surrounding woodland and grasslands, our ponds boost biodiversity of all sorts – from bats to beetles.
Making space for wildlife
We’ve designed our new gardens to provide as much space as possible for wildlife.
The ponds are a key part of the design. They’re a haven for insects, who in turn encourage bats and birds. Their banks and water provide places for toads and newts to shelter and breed. Plus, the trees that surround them will allow insects to thrive and grow in numbers each year.
Insect life, such as water scorpions and water boatmen, thrive in our ponds.
Helping willow emerald damselflies
The willow emerald damselfly is a recent arrival to the UK. The species was first spotted in East Anglia in 2007.
Following an exciting first sighting of willow emerald damselflies in our gardens we’ve been managing the plants around our ponds to provide them with the perfect habitat.
The willow emerald damselfly lays its eggs in willow trees near bodies of water, such as ponds or canals. Without willow trees, they can’t breed.
The female willow emerald damselfly makes little cuts in the willow branches that overhang water. If you look closely, you might spot little scars where these cuts have healed. Their eggs remain in these branches over the winter then hatch the following year. After hatching, the larvae fall into the water where they complete their development.
Because the eggs stay in the willow branches, it’s important that we don’t prune our willows in winter.
We make sure that when it comes to pruning the plants in our gardens, we always keep in mind the various timescales and needs of different species.
Make your own pond
We’ve got some top tips to help you learn how to make your own wildlife pond or bog in a garden or communal space.
Toads
We’re lucky to have quite a lot of toads living in our gardens. They’re a little inbred, as they don’t tend to leave our gardens here in South Kensington, but that doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem for them.
Toads breed in spring, heading to ponds around Valentines’ Day to breed and lay eggs. If you visit our ponds in early or late spring, you might see their toadspawn in the water or even some tadpoles.
For the rest of the year, they can be found hunting and hiding in earthy places or resting under logs and in hollows. During the winter, they hibernate in an underground chamber called a hibernaculum.
Newts
Smooth newts are native to the UK and are the most common newt found in our gardens.
To make them feel at home, we’ve built lots of log piles, known as refugia, where they can shelter in the winter. When we rejigged our existing ponds as part of plans for our new gardens, we safely moved the newts to a temporary pond where they could shelter and breed.
The newts in our gardens are relatively trapped by the major roads that surround us, but there’s still a chance that they’ll set off across the tarmac in search of a new home.
Steph Holt, our UK Biodiversity Training Manager, regularly surveys our newt population. During one night spent surveying our newts, we counted 199 adults – that’s a lot of newts!
But we didn’t just count them, we also photographed their tummies. Each newt has a distinct pattern of dots on its belly, and by taking a series of photographs, Steph hopes we can use machine learning to recognise individual newts through their patterns.
Our gardens have dark spaces for bats to fly through in the summer months.
Bringing back the bats
Many insects live above and around our ponds and their presence entices bats to come to our gardens in search of food.
We know bats are visiting our gardens because we’ve picked them up using a bat detector that detects the sonar they use to navigate in the dark. Using it, we’ve spotted a couple of different types of pipistrelle bat flying around at night. This is more than you might expect given the surrounding bright streetlights.
To encourage these bats to come back and to make them feel more at home, we’ve designed our new gardens to have dark spaces. We’ll keep these spaces dark from spring to autumn when bats are out and about.
Daphnia, also called water fleas, are small crustaceans that live in ponds. They’re very small, with bodies that are only up to five millimetres long.
Listening to wildlife
In the future, we’ll monitor what species of bat are in our gardens using audio recorders called audio moths.
But it’s not just bats that we’ll be listening to. We’re listening in to a whole bunch of wildlife using audio recorders placed throughout our gardens. They’ll record everything – from the worms in the soil to the beetles in the trees.
