Swimming pools are as popular as ever. Nothing wrong with that in a week of sapping heat, but for landscape designers like Tom Mannion, incorporating a pool into a garden can be tricky.
The basic rectangular pool, clear and chlorinated to death, is boring and sterile.
"Water is life," says Mannion, based in Arlington, Va., "and yet a swimming pool is not."
Landscape architects and designers are striving to make the pool a less jarring element. One approach is to tie it visually, if not physically, to a nearby body of water, artificial or natural.
In Europe, that barrier has been broken altogether. Swimming pools form parts of larger ponds where plantings filter the water. "I guess in theory you could have enough plant life to clean the water," says Richard Arentz, a landscape architect based in Washington. "Can you get it so clean it would meet American tastes? I don't think we are there yet."
Mannion, however, has put his toe in the water with a couple of projects in Northern Virginia. In the first, he designed a swimming pool with a submerged landing to hold three large pots. The pots are not sealed, and the roots of the plants - miscanthus grass, canna and dwarf papyrus - are soaked by the pool water. The chlorination doesn't seem to harm them, Mannion said. He points out that municipal tap water used to irrigate the garden also is chlorinated.
In a second project, he designed a swimming pool with two sunken planters, each loaded with dirt, planted with water iris and mulched with gravel, which helps to hold down the soil. Look closely and you can see the gravel developing algae, but the pond is unclouded by mud and free of visible bugs.
The effect is given a major boost with the installation of a decorative pond on the other side of a flagstone path. The pond is murkier, and enlivened by fish, iris planters mirroring those in the pool, and other aquatic plants growing out of pots.
In a moist, slow-draining swale bed flanking the fishpond, Mannion has installed bog plants. As the perennials and shrubs develop in the next couple of years, he sees a seamless progression of robust aquatic vegetation from pool to pond to plant bed.
Something so modest, however, has left pond-maintenance companies scratching their heads. One refused to even consider taking on the contract, saying the firm had one account where the in-pool cleaning robot got dislodged and started squirting chlorinated water into an adjoining fishpond, killing the koi. Others said they can't guarantee that a pool would be "pristine."
Mannion is a disciple of Dutch designer Henk Weijers and went to see Weijers' naturalistic swimming pool projects in 1995. "It's taken me 11 years to work up the courage to do this," he says.
Mannion concedes, however, that filtering pool water through an adjoining artificial wetland would be more difficult here because mosquitoes are a bigger problem than in Western Europe.
While other designers have not yet followed Mannion's use of plants in swimming pools, they are striving to integrate the swimming pool more successfully into a larger landscape.
"People are much more design savvy and don't want the pool as this big barren thing in the middle of the back yard," says Washington landscaper Jordan Honeyman.
Arentz, whose company is known for its pool designs, has found other ways to convey nature in swimming pools. He created a double-tiered pool lined in boulders. In the lower pool, a waterfall crashes near a grotto. In another project, he used natural stone in decking around the pond and placed a large boulder as a diving platform.
But as for plants in the water? "I think Europeans tend to be more relaxed about the idea of swimming. Here, we want it to be clean, to make sure the last bit of algae is filtered out of it."