Welcome to earthponds
A resource for pond builders, pond lovers, and home owners.
Why earthponds?
Experience and Knowledge
Tim Matson is an award winning author about ponds, pond design, and pond building. If you are into pond building, planning to build a pond, or repairing an existing pond, you have come to the right place. Tim consults with scores of property owners each year, providing advice and counsel at reasonable rates. Photo by Joe Mehling.
Monthly Pondology Essays
Each month, Tim writes an original essay about pond maintenance; the latest trends in design; ecological concerns; and wetlands regulations. NEWS FROM THE WATERFRONT can be delivered directly to you via email. Use the contact form to sign up for the pondology, or contact Tim about your pond project.
DECEMBER 2020: I visited a couple of beaver troubled ponds this past summer. In both ponds the beavers were doing what comes naturally, packing the dam spillway to curtail overflow. Beavers are known to respond to the sound of discharging water by plugging the dam, and they were succeeding. In one case it was a leaky beaver-made dam they were fixing; the other was a man-made dam with a concrete drop box with a noisy sluiceway they wanted to plug. Maybe it wasn't just dam repair they were up to. The summer was drought dry -- were they were hoping to raise water levels and stop the pond shrinkage due to drought?
Whatever the motivation, in both cases they were successful. And it had the caretakers worried. The pond with the beaver dam had been enlarged with a higher water level that turned an adjacent brushy field into a shallow lagoon. The water was getting close to the house. In the other pond the water level was a foot or more higher than the designed discharge. In this pond the beavers had a record of plugging the spillway to the point that heavy rains in the past had overtopped the dam and flooded a nearby road. To learn about strategies for preventing beaver problems in your pond, click here.
Tim matson'S photography website
Another Side of Tim Matson
Before his work in pond design, Tim Matson was an award-winning photographer and story teller. His new website offers a look at early work, much of it never seen. Now you can.
"Matson has the eye of a cinematographer,"
The Harvard Crimson
CLICK HERE to visit the new site.
Featured book
Earth Ponds A-Z Encyclopedia
"Aside from some particularly thoughtful frogs and phragmites, no one on earth knows more about ponds than Tim Matson. His books have counseled and consoled me through the digging of two ponds, making a daunting process far more interesting and pleasurable than it deserved to be. His... A to Z Encyclopedia is the ultimate pond-owner's companion, brimming with sound advice, smart suggestions, and answers to ancient riddles. But this book doesn't only instruct -- there's delight here too." Michael Pollan,
author of the Botany of Desire, Cooked, How to Change Your Mind, and more.