Long or short, babbling or boisterous, with ponds or without, and almost always including waterfalls, man-made streams are enhancements that many professional landscapers love to work on, and that customers love to have. And who can blame them? Free-flowing water is one of nature's most picturesque, calming yet captivating wonders. And unlike others such as a mountain panorama, an old-growth forest or rhythmic ocean waves, streams are wonders that owners of residential and commercial properties can add to enhance their surroundings. LC/DBM readers sent great examples of these projects and what follows is a takeaway of best practices in the craft of stream building.

Making Your Bed
As is typical, the scope of the project dictates the procedures, and tools needed, to prepare the worksite.

Many are excavated by hands wielding shovels as was the case with a water feature encompassing a top waterfall spilling into a 2'-deep pond, followed by a 4'-long creek, then a second waterfall flowing into a 5'x5' bottom pond in Dunsmuir, Calif., south of Mt. Shasta by Cameron Marsala, the owner of Camelot Landscaping and Stoneworks.

Dave White and his crew at Glacier View Landscape & Design Inc. of Longmont, Colorado dug, by hand, a pond that is 12" to 16" deep, a 6'-wide, 5'-long, 4'-deep hole for an underground well that collects the water, and a streambed - to get it below grade.

"We did that so that it was little more natural-looking and set down into the slope as opposed to being built up on both sides," White says.

When the project calls for it, and access is readily available, machines are called upon for the prep work. Scott Conner of Scott Conner Landscape used a mini-excavator on two of his recent projects in Paradise, Calif., about 90 miles north of Sacramento. One included a water well, whose excavation he has this advice about.

"To get the underground reservoirs large enough, you have to correctly calculate how much water is going to be in the streambed." Sometimes the scope of the project means that hydraulic engineers are involved as was the case on a water feature that Matthew Giampietro helped install on a private island off the shore of Connecticut. Kane Brothers from Chicago was hired by the contractor, Ultimate Services Landscape Management Company, to engineer the specifics of a 172'-long stream with five ponds.

Excavation for this project was quite intense. As Giampietro reports, the island itself is just one big piece of granite. In fact, it is the home of the historical Stony Creek quarry that produces pink granite stones - some were even used for the base of the Statue of Liberty. Workers from Ultimate Services did the excavation, sculpting the ground in shifts using jackhammers over the course of five weeks.

Rock Procurement
Boulders and large pieces of stone are a staple of stream building and the different projects here illustrate a variety of ways that they can be obtained.

For Scott Conner's two projects, the rocks came from a contract he made with the government to collect them – in an allotted amount of time – from gold mining tailing piles on public property. The contract took a while to get finalized and he admits it was not cheap. The rocks that Carmen Marsala used on his project were gathered in the mountains of Northern California after first obtaining a $15 permit from the U.S. Forest Service that stipulates where the stones can come from.

Matthew Giampietro did not have to worry about securing permission to gather his cache of building materials because the island where they all came from was privately owned. He took two weeks finding and then tagging them.

Landscape supply company Tribble Stone of Boulder, Colo., is where Dave White of Glacier View got all of his materials: Colorado buff flagstone, 2"-4" and 5"-12" gray rose cobble, granite boulders and Mexican beach pebbles. Scott Stone supplied rocks from the mountains of Virginia for the water feature at the wedding venue in North Carolina.

Rock Movement
From his collection of rocks, Scott Conner transports what he needs for a given project by loading them into the back of a pickup and trailer with a mini excavator, which is then used to place them.

Matthew Giampietro reports that the island's terrain on his project was so rough that machines often could not get next to the selected large rocks. So the crew would drive excavators or ATVs as close as possible, attach ropes to them and then pull them as close to the project site as they could.

To place the large stones, the crew would slide them on planks, roll them on top of pipes, and adjust them with pry bars. His "patient crew" not only helped him set over 500 large stones, but also line the water feature with hundreds of small rocks collected from the shore, sifted to remove the sand, and carried to the site in buckets To get his rocks out of the forest, Carmen Marsala likes to use a two-wheel rock dolly, which can carry up to 500 pounds. He uses a pry bar to lift them on to the dolly, and a ramp to get the dolly into the truck bed.

Recently, Marsala purchased a mini skid steer to help place rocks and is checking with the Forest Service to see if he can use it to gather them.

Glacier View's six-man crew mainly relied on "Egyptian engineering" to set the rocks in the project featured here. "We used steel rollers, brute force and ignorance," says Dave White. "With small backyards, getting a machine in makes more mess than it's worth."

However, he did have to bring in a crane in to set the large granite boulders.

Man-Made Materials
All of the projects in this story included pumps, various diameters of flex pipe, solid PVC and rubberized tubing with metal coil inside, and pond liners.

Some of them used waterfall boxes, different sizes of underground reservoirs, and other materials beneath the liners such as a polyethylene fabric on one of Scott Conner's projects, and several layers of woven weed barrier on the Glacier View project.

Also on that one, there is an auto-fill feature connected to the irrigation system. As water evaporates from the water feature, a valve is activated that allows water into the well to a certain level.

The Connecticut island project included a 12-foot surge tank that collects the water if the system is ever turned off.

Filters were used on some of the projects while others relied on natural filtering such as retention ponds, natural bacteria and small rocks.

Softening the Site
According to Matthew Giampietro, "Plantings are key to the success of a stream. Part of the art of rock placement is creating areas for plants - negative spaces or pockets where plants will grow."

Aquatic plants are submerged in a water feature. Marginal aquatic plants are installed close to the sides. They grow best when their roots are very wet but not totally submerged.

When installing non-aquatic plants near a water feature, Carmen Marsala advises to use root barriers to prevent roots from tearing through liners and into ponds.

More Advice from the Pros
More Advice from the Pros To help achieve a more organic look, Scott Conner reminds that in natural streams, moss rocks do not have moss growing on them below the water line.

"I'm too picky on my stuff," he admits. "I've been known to take something apart if I don't like it. It has to be natural-looking and I have to be satisfied."

Matthew Giampietro echoes Conner's persistence for precision. "If I put a boulder down and it doesn't look good from all angles, I'm going to take it out and try another one." He cautions that it's hard to estimate the cost to build water features beforehand and suggests pricing it on a time and materials basis.

Dave White finds, "that if the customer doesn't want to pay for what it really takes to build a water feature right, then they're not ready for a water feature." And to get past any apprehension of jumping in, Conner suggests to just try one – maybe on your own property. If you don't enjoy the experience don't add it as a service.

But if you do enjoy it, try to find something to improve upon each time you build another stream.