I thought a few of our ideas on water garden design would be helpful in making your water garden a success.  Water features don't necessarily require very much space.  With a few mosquito fish there is never any risk of those pesky stinging insects.

All of this plant life and water gurgling comes in a 3 foot diameter concrete crock.  The four-leaf clover is actually an aquatic fern called Marselia.    There is a dwarf water lily buried in here but it never bloomed in this shaded location, the grassy looking plant is a Juncus patens.  To get water filtration we pump the water through gravel and a bit of perforated flexible tubing. This long amazed me but the water was always clear.  I drilled a hole in this rock.  The water sloshed around in the small basin in the rock and drained out through the bottom.   I put in a few small fish to eat the mosquitoes.  Many water plants don't appreciate splash and water movement but I wanted the water noise by my office door.  This lasted about 3 years without having anything done to it until we got a new pup named Clover who thought it was her lucky day to have all this water just for her.  She now has a pond of her own and this one is starting to grow back.