If you line your pond with a pond liner, you will notice that the liner remains visible in some places. You can read here what you can do to cover the pond liner and make it visually invisible, and whether you should cover pond liner completely.
How can you cover the pond liner and make it visually invisible?
To make the pond liner visually invisible, bank and embankment mats, stone liners or coconut mats can be used. These materials protect the film from sunlight, enable edge planting and ensure an attractive, natural look.
Capillary barrier
One of the most disturbing areas of the garden pond is the edge area. Here the pond liner must be led over the edge of the pond and through a small ditch and then buried. This is essential asCapillary barrier.
The capillary barrier means that the surrounding soil does not simply “suck the pond dry” through capillary action. This would inevitably be the case if the edges of the pond were unprotected and the pond liner was only pulled up to below the edge of the pond.
The problem is that the foil remains visible at this point - and that doesn't look very nice. Sprinkling the foil with gravel is an option, but in most cases it's not a particularly good one.
Bank and embankment mats
These mats can simply be placed on the pond liner. They reach down a little over the embankment and cover the foil very well in the edge area. This has several advantages:
- The pond liner is well protected in the edge area from destructive sunlight
- The foils allow the edge of the pond to be planted, so that in the end the edge of the pond looks completely inconspicuous
- Slope films give different design materials (small plants, stones, moss) good support, so that varied designs can be created.
In terms of price, the mats are quite reasonable - they are available in different widths between 60 cm and 2 m, and you should expect around 10 EUR per meter. A starter planting including suitable fertilizer is often included (flowers or moss). The flower solutions in particular often bloom very intensively and are usually quite easy to care for.
You should be careful with coconut mats or jute mats. Although they are also a good solution, they often rot within a few years. Then they have to be removed because they also cause unpleasant smells when they rot.
Stone foils
Stone liners are also an option for covering the pond liner in the bank area. They consist of a plastic mat covered with a small layer of stone. The steepness of the slope is irrelevant when using stone foils; they can be used on all types of slopes - whether flat or steep. The prices are about the same as for plant films and bank mats.
Tip
You can also use stone liners to visually hide the pond liner in a stream and to better protect the pond liner. However, completely lining the interior of a pond with stone liner is usually unnecessary and usually pointless.
